The IEEPA Refund Clock: 180-Day Protest Deadlines and What Importers Must File Now

The refund obligation flows from the Supreme Court’s February 20, 2026 decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, 607 U.S. ___ (2026), which held 6-3 that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs. The legal fight over what happens next is still moving, which is exactly why you cannot wait for it to resolve before acting. On June 2, the Department of Justice appealed the Court of International Trade’s order directing reliquidation of affected entries. An appeal does not pause the individual deadlines that run on your own entries; the 180-day protest clock keeps ticking while the lawyers argue.

The calendar got busier from there. CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott was ordered to appear before Senior Judge Richard Eaton at the Court of International Trade on June 9, and a settlement conference in the Euro-Notions case is set for June 11. Any of those could change the shape of the refund program, but none of them resets a protest deadline that has already run. That is the asymmetry every importer needs to sit with: the litigation might eventually hand you a cleaner path, and it might not, but your Form 19 window expires on its own schedule regardless.

Meanwhile, CAPE Phase 2, the phase built to handle finally-liquidated entries, has no launch date. CBP has said more functionality is coming for the more complicated scenarios that Phase 1 left out, but “coming” is not a date you can file against. So the practical reality for anyone holding finally-liquidated IEEPA entries is this: the only refund mechanism you control today is the protest, and it has a hard expiration.

There are three doors, and the right one depends entirely on where your entry sits in the liquidation lifecycle. Most importers have entries behind more than one door, which is why you sort entry by entry rather than picking a single strategy for the whole company.

• CAPE Phase 1. If the entry has not yet liquidated, or it is still inside the 90-day voluntary reliquidation period, the CAPE Portal route is the cleanest. No protest, no court case. You file the Declaration and the refund moves to issuance.
• Form 19 protest. If the entry has finally liquidated (more than 90 days ago) but you are still inside the 180-day protest window, file a Form 19. This is the administrative route, and it is the one with the deadline you are racing.
• Court of International Trade. If the 180-day protest window has already closed, or your protest gets denied, the CIT is what remains. It is the most expensive and slowest of the three, and you do not want to default into it because you let a Form 19 deadline lapse.

The whole point of getting this sort right is that the doors do not stay open forever. CAPE Phase 1 has its own eligibility limits. The protest window is 180 days from liquidation. And the CIT route, while always technically available within its own statute of limitations, costs you the cheap options if you arrive there by accident. The checker below maps your situation to the door.

A worked example makes the sort obvious. Say you imported three shipments. The first cleared customs in March 2026 and has not liquidated yet, so it goes through CAPE Phase 1, no protest required. The second liquidated on April 15, 2026, which means it is finally liquidated once the 90-day voluntary reliquidation period runs but is still well inside its 180-day protest window, so it gets a Form 19. The third liquidated back in late 2025 with no protest filed; its window has already closed, so the CIT is the only door left. Three shipments, three different filings, and the only way to know which is which is the liquidation date on each one.

Notice what the routes share and where they split. CAPE and the protest are both administrative, meaning you deal with CBP directly and the cost is low. The CIT is judicial, which is a different posture with a different price tag. The protest is the hinge between the two: file it in time and you stay in the cheap administrative lane; miss it and you are pushed into court. That is why the protest deadline, not the appeal and not the eventual Phase 2 launch, is the date that should drive your calendar this summer.

Liquidation is CBP’s word for finalizing an entry: it is the moment the agency calculates the final duties owed and closes the books on that import. Until liquidation, the entry is still open and the numbers can move. After liquidation, the entry is settled unless someone reopens it through one of the legal channels.

“Finally liquidated” is a legal term of art under 19 U.S.C. 1514, and it requires three conditions to be true simultaneously: the 90-day voluntary reliquidation window under 19 U.S.C. 1501 has expired (so CBP cannot reliquidate on its own), the importer has not filed a protest within 180 days of liquidation, and no civil action has been filed at the Court of International Trade. An entry that meets all three conditions is conclusive upon all persons including the United States and is the hardest category to reach for recovery. The 90-day window is the same one that defines part of CAPE Phase 1 eligibility: inside it, CBP can reliquidate voluntarily and Phase 1 can still reach the entry. Outside it, the entry is finally liquidated unless a timely protest or court action preserves the importer’s rights.

This matters because importers routinely conflate “I imported the goods” with “the entry liquidated.” The protest clock does not start when the container clears the port. It starts on the liquidation date, which CBP posts and which you can verify against your entry record. An entry imported in 2025 might not have liquidated until early 2026, which is precisely the cohort now staring down June-to-August deadlines.

A refund is not just the duty you overpaid. CBP issues IEEPA refunds with interest, calculated on the overpaid amount from the date you deposited the duty through the date the refund is issued. The principal is the over-collected duty; the interest is what CBP pays for having held your money in the interim.

That changes how you think about timing. A protest or CIT case that takes longer to resolve is not a pure loss of the time value of money, because the interest accrues over that whole period. The duty you overpaid keeps earning while the claim is pending. It is not a windfall, the rate is the government’s, not a market return, but it does mean a slow refund is not the same as a smaller one.

For planning, treat the refund as two numbers: the principal, which is the IEEPA duty you can document on each entry’s Form 7501, and the interest, which grows with elapsed time. When you are weighing whether to sell a claim or wait, or whether a CIT case is worth the cost, run both numbers. A six-figure principal that has been accruing interest for a year is a different decision than the principal alone.

The interest math also reframes the cost of the litigation delay. Yes, the DOJ appeal and the unsettled reliquidation order mean your refund might take longer to land than a clean CAPE Phase 1 filing would have. But the duty you overpaid is not sitting idle while you wait. The interest clock runs in your favor over the same period the legal clock runs against you, so the delay erodes less of your position than it first appears. That is cold comfort if you needed the cash last quarter, and it is exactly why the secondary market exists, but it is the right way to size the real cost of waiting.

The same secondary market that grew up around CAPE Phase 1 refunds applies to protest and CIT claims. Hedge funds and trade-finance firms offer importers immediate cash in exchange for assigning them the refund claim. Following the February 2026 Supreme Court ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, prices in the secondary market have ranged from roughly 50 cents to 90 cents on the dollar depending on the clarity and age of the specific claim; the fund pays that percentage up front and collects the full amount when the refund eventually issues.

The economics tilt differently for protest and CIT claims than they did for clean Phase 1 refunds. A Phase 1 refund was on a relatively short clock. A finally-liquidated entry working through a protest, or worse a CIT case, can take longer, and that longer horizon is exactly what a buyer is pricing when they offer you toward the lower end of the range today. The claim is still ultimately against the U.S. government, so credit risk is minimal, but the timing risk and the litigation outcome risk are real, and the discount reflects them.

If you do sell, the instrument is an assignment agreement, and you read it the way you would read any assignment of a receivable: who bears the risk if the refund is delayed, what happens if the protest is denied, what recourse you have if the buyer refuses to release the claim back to you. Importers structured as an LLC should also check their LLC operating agreement before assigning a large claim, since the agreement may require member consent to sell or encumber a company asset of that size. For most importers who can carry the wait, the interest accrual on the underlying claim is a reason to hold rather than sell at a discount.

CAPE Phase 1 was built deliberately narrow. It handled the entries that were easiest to process: unliquidated entries and those still inside the 90-day voluntary reliquidation window. Everything harder, finally-liquidated entries, the entries with complications, was pushed to a later phase. As of June 2026, that later phase has no launch date.

Part of why Phase 2 sits in limbo is the same litigation moving through the courts. On May 29, 2026, CBP reversed its earlier position and claimed it “lacked the ability” to issue refunds for entries where 180 days had already passed since liquidation without a court order specifically authorizing it. That reversal triggered the DOJ motion to appeal, the June 9 hearing before Senior Judge Richard Eaton at the Court of International Trade, and the June 11 settlement conference. It is hard for CBP to finalize the mechanics of refunding finally-liquidated entries while the legal foundation for that reliquidation is being contested. So the program waits, and your finally-liquidated entries wait with it, except for the one thing you control, the protest clock.

The practical guidance has not changed since our CAPE filing guide: keep your records clean, monitor CBP’s IEEPA Duty Refunds page for the Phase 2 announcement, and be ready to refile when it lands. The difference now is the clock. Do not let a Phase 2 that may arrive someday talk you out of filing a protest that expires this summer. The protest is the bird in the hand.