CBP opens the final tranche of IEEPA tariff refunds to roughly 3,700 court plaintiffs, unlocking a claims pool reported at more than $134 billion and leaving thousands of non-litigating importers still waiting at the door
WASHINGTON, Oct. 6, 2026
U.S. Customs and Border Protection today opened the third and most consequential phase of its Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries program, the mechanism the agency built to return duties collected under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act before the Supreme Court stripped that statute of its tariff authority in February.
Phase 3 is narrow by design and enormous in value. It applies only to entries that have been finally liquidated, meaning the statutory window for ordinary reliquidation has closed and only a court order can reopen them. The order in question, issued by Senior Judge Richard K. Eaton of the U.S. Court of International Trade on July 17, covers roughly 3,700 coordinated IEEPA cases, according to an analysis published by Troutman Pepper Locke. Rio Times Online reports that those plaintiffs have had approximately $134.7 billion in claims accepted, a figure that dwarfs most single-year customs revenue line items and sits close to what the federal government collected under the invalidated authority in a full year.
Freight forwarder C.H. Robinson, in its October trade update for clients, said CBP has already certified roughly $122 billion in refunds and interest for Treasury payment across the earlier phases of the program. Phase 3 is the part of the pipeline that reaches the oldest and most legally complicated entries, the ones importers had largely written off.
For customs brokers, trade counsel and corporate treasurers, the practical question this morning is not whether the money exists. It is who gets to file, how quickly CBP moves, and what the agency will deduct before the wire arrives.
How the program got here
The sequence began with Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, the case in which the Supreme Court held on Feb. 20, 2026, that IEEPA does not confer authority on the President to impose tariffs. The decision reached the fentanyl-related measures and the broader reciprocal tariff architecture that had been layered on top of them, and it left the government holding more than a year of duty collections with no lawful basis.
What followed was not a single refund order but a staged administrative construction. On March 4, 2026, the Court of International Trade addressed the scope question directly, concluding that all importers of record whose entries were subject to IEEPA duties are entitled to the benefit of the Learning Resources decision. The court reasoned that requiring every affected importer to file a separate suit for duties the Supreme Court had already invalidated would, in its words, thwart the efficient administration of justice.
That principle was broad. The machinery built to execute it has been considerably narrower, and the gap between the two is the source of most of the friction in the trade bar right now.
CBP responded by standing up CAPE, a declaration-based system that asks importers to identify their own affected entries rather than requiring the agency to reconstruct them. Phase 1 and Phase 2 handled entries still within the ordinary liquidation and reliquidation windows, where CBP had clear administrative authority to act. Those phases moved a large volume of money, which is how the certified total reached the $122 billion figure C.H. Robinson cites.
Phase 3 is different. Finally liquidated entries are, under ordinary customs law, closed. The only route back in runs through a court. Judge Eaton’s July 17 reliquidation order supplied that route, but it supplied it only for the parties in front of him. Importers who paid the same invalidated duties on the same kinds of goods in the same months, and who simply did not sue, are not covered by the order and cannot file a Phase 3 declaration.
The filing mechanics
Under the schedule CBP published, importers who submitted their importer of record numbers to the agency by July 30, 2026, may file Phase 3 declarations beginning today. Those who identified themselves after that cutoff enter a rolling biweekly queue, a cadence that trade counsel expect to stretch the tail of the program into 2027.
The declaration itself is a sworn identification exercise. The filer confirms importer of record status, identifies the finally liquidated entries that carried IEEPA duties, and supplies the entry-level detail CBP needs to reliquidate. Crucially, the reliquidation is partial. CBP removes the IEEPA line and leaves everything else standing, which means Section 232 duties on steel, aluminum, copper, polysilicon, drones, semiconductors and pharmaceuticals remain payable, as do Section 301 duties and any antidumping or countervailing duty deposits on the same entry.
That distinction matters more in 2026 than it would have a year ago, because the duty stack on a typical entry has grown considerably more complex. An importer who assumes the refund restores the pre-2025 landed cost will be disappointed. The refund unwinds one layer of a structure that now has several.
CBP retains discretion at the entry level. As the Rio Times summary of the program puts it, CBP can accept, reject or seek clarification of individual entries. Payment runs through Automated Clearing House transfer, with paper checks reserved for narrow regulatory exceptions, a detail that has sent a number of mid-market importers scrambling to confirm that the banking information on file with the agency is current.
The offset problem
The single most contested feature of the program, and the one most likely to generate litigation in the coming months, is CBP’s use of administrative offset.
Troutman Pepper Locke’s analysis states the practice plainly: CBP has been offsetting IEEPA refunds against other amounts it says importers owe, including disputed debts unrelated to IEEPA. In practice that means a company expecting a seven-figure refund may receive a materially smaller number, with the difference applied against penalty claims, supplemental duty bills or antidumping assessments that the importer is actively contesting.
The due process objection writes itself. An amount still under protest or still in litigation has not been finally determined to be owed. Netting it against a refund the courts have already ordered converts a contested claim into a collected one without adjudication, and it does so at a moment when the importer has limited leverage to object without delaying the rest of its refund.
Trade counsel interviewed in published commentary on the rollout have flagged this as the issue most likely to produce a second wave of CIT filings, this time about the refund process itself rather than the underlying tariffs. For importers, the defensive move is procedural: reconcile the full CBP account before filing, document every open protest, and treat any unexplained reduction in a refund wire as a deadline-bearing event rather than an accounting discrepancy.
Who is left out
The equity gap in the program is substantial and is drawing increasing attention from trade associations.
Phase 3 reaches plaintiffs. The March 4 CIT ruling reached, in principle, everyone. Importers who paid IEEPA duties and never filed suit are in an awkward middle position: they hold a judicially recognized entitlement with no administrative vehicle to execute it on finally liquidated entries. Their options are to file their own actions, which is expensive and slow for companies whose exposure runs to six figures rather than nine, or to wait for CBP to extend the program, which the agency has not committed to doing.
That split has a predictable size bias. The companies with the resources to join coordinated litigation in 2025 and early 2026 were largely large importers with standing trade counsel. Small and mid-sized importers, customs brokers report, were disproportionately on the sidelines, and they are disproportionately excluded now.
Foreign exporters are outside the process entirely. As the Rio Times analysis notes, Latin American and African exporters cannot claim refunds directly; whatever benefit reaches them depends on commercial renegotiation with their U.S. buyers rather than on any legal entitlement. In sectors where exporters absorbed part of the tariff through price concessions in 2025, that creates an uncomfortable conversation: the U.S. importer is being made whole, the foreign supplier who shared the pain is not, and nothing in the refund order requires the former to share with the latter.
Expect that to surface in contract negotiations through the fourth quarter, particularly in apparel, furniture and agricultural inputs, where price-sharing arrangements were common and informal.
Sector by sector, the recovery is uneven
The headline claims pool is dominated by a handful of import-heavy sectors, and the distribution of relief across them is not proportional to the pain those sectors felt in 2025.
Consumer goods importers, particularly in apparel, footwear, toys and home furnishings, carried the IEEPA burden on high-volume, low-margin entries. For them the refund is restorative in the most direct sense: the duty was a pure cost pass-through that many could not fully recover at the shelf, and the recovery lands on entries where no other special duty applies. These are also the importers most likely to find that Section 301 forced labor duties, effective since July 24, have moved into the space IEEPA vacated, which blunts the forward benefit even where the backward recovery is clean.
Industrial and capital goods importers face a more complicated reconciliation. Entries covering steel-intensive machinery, fabricated metal components and electrical equipment frequently carried both IEEPA duties and Section 232 metals duties, and in many cases a derivative-product metals calculation applied to only part of the entered value. Stripping the IEEPA line from those entries requires careful allocation, and brokers report that these are the filings where CBP is most likely to seek clarification rather than accept a declaration as submitted.
Electronics and semiconductor importers occupy a third position. The 25 percent Section 232 duty on certain advanced semiconductor articles, imposed earlier this year, has reshaped the duty profile of entries that in 2025 carried IEEPA duties alone. For these filers, the refund arrives against a forward cost base that has risen rather than fallen, and finance teams are being careful not to present the recovery internally as evidence that tariff exposure is receding.
Pharmaceutical importers are the newest entrants to the complexity. The 100 percent Section 232 duty on certain patented pharmaceutical products took effect Sept. 29, with zero-rate eligibility available for specified specialty medicines from a defined list of jurisdictions. Entries from the IEEPA period predate that structure entirely, which makes the refund calculation relatively clean, but it also means these companies are managing a historic recovery and a brand-new duty exposure in the same quarter with the same small trade compliance teams.
Agricultural and food importers, finally, sit closest to the exporter equity problem described above. Price-sharing with foreign suppliers was most common in commodity and semi-commodity agricultural trade, and these are the relationships in which the refund is most likely to prompt a renegotiation request from the supplier side.
Interest, timing and the cash flow question
An underappreciated feature of the program is that the certified totals include interest, not just principal. C.H. Robinson’s October client note refers to roughly $122 billion in refunds and interest already certified for Treasury payment, and the interest component on duties held for periods stretching back to early 2025 is not trivial at prevailing statutory rates.
For importers, that creates a timing incentive and a modeling problem at the same time. The incentive is to file early and accurately, because the queue is sequential and the biweekly rolling schedule for late identifiers means that a company which missed the July 30 cutoff may wait months behind one that did not. The modeling problem is that interest accrual, offset deductions and partial reliquidation interact in ways that make the final wire difficult to forecast with precision. Treasurers who have booked a specific recovery figure into fourth-quarter cash projections are being advised by their advisers to widen the range considerably.
There is also a reputational dimension inside companies. Trade compliance functions spent 2025 explaining to boards why landed costs had risen by double digits. Those same functions are now explaining why the money coming back is smaller than the money that went out, and why the forward rate structure has not improved. The two conversations are harder to hold together than they look on a spreadsheet.
The fiscal picture
The refunds are a material federal cash flow event. Against a backdrop in which, by the Atlantic Council’s estimate, IEEPA collected roughly $166 billion in 2025, returning $122 billion already certified plus whatever Phase 3 unlocks represents a reversal of close to a full year of the program’s receipts.
The administration has not left the revenue hole open. Since the February ruling, the tariff architecture has been rebuilt on other statutory footings. Section 232 has been expanded aggressively, with metals tariffs strengthened in April and modified again in June, a 15 percent duty and minimum import price regime applied to polysilicon and its derivatives in August, a 25 percent rate on certain advanced semiconductor articles, tariffs reaching as high as 100 percent on imported drones and drone components, and a 100 percent duty on certain patented pharmaceutical products that took effect Sept. 29, subject to zero-rate eligibility for specified specialty medicines from a list of jurisdictions including the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland and the European Union.
Section 301 has carried the rest of the load. USTR initiated investigations covering some 60 trade partners in March, with final forced labor tariffs taking effect July 24 and a parallel set of excess capacity investigations covering 16 partners still running. The Atlantic Council’s modeling suggests that the Section 301 architecture could generate up to $169 billion annually at 2025 import levels, close to parity with what IEEPA produced, though it cautions that the replacement is structurally more fragile, requiring simultaneous management of multiple investigations with different legal predicates and different expiry risks.
The practical consequence for importers is that the refund arriving this quarter is not a reduction in forward tariff exposure. It is a one-time recovery of past overpayment inside a regime whose current effective rates are, for many origins, comparable to or higher than what they replaced.
What importers should do now
Several action items follow directly from the structure of Phase 3.
First, confirm eligibility rather than assuming it. Being a member of a trade association that litigated, or being referenced in a filing, is not the same as being a named plaintiff with an importer of record number on file and an entry covered by the Eaton reliquidation order. The three conditions are cumulative.
Second, reconcile the entry universe before filing. CAPE is a declaration system, which places the burden of accurate entry identification on the importer and creates exposure for overstated claims. Entries that moved through multiple brokers, entries subject to post-summary corrections, and entries where IEEPA duties were paid on a portion of the line value are the ones most likely to produce errors.
Third, model the refund net of offsets and net of the duties that survive. A reliquidation that strips IEEPA and preserves Section 232 and Section 301 on the same entry can produce a recovery materially below the gross IEEPA line.
Fourth, treat the accounting and tax treatment as a live question. Duties previously expensed through cost of goods sold are returning as recoveries, and the period in which they are recognized will affect reported margins. Companies that took tariff-related charges in 2025 will want their auditors engaged before the wires land, not after.
Fifth, address the supplier conversation deliberately. Where a foreign supplier shared tariff cost through discounting, the refund creates a windfall on the U.S. side of a shared burden. Handling that transparently is a relationship decision with commercial consequences in a market where supply chains have already been reshuffled twice in eighteen months.
Finally, for importers outside the plaintiff class, the calculus is whether to litigate now. The CIT’s March reasoning is favorable on the merits, and the cost of an action has to be weighed against an exposure that, for many mid-market importers, remains substantial. Waiting for CBP to extend the program voluntarily is a strategy, but it is not a plan.
The wider signal
Phase 3 closes a chapter that began with a sweeping assertion of emergency tariff authority and ended with the largest customs refund operation in the agency’s history. The lesson that trade practitioners are drawing is less about IEEPA specifically than about duration risk. Tariff programs built on contested legal authority can be unwound, and when they are, the unwinding is administratively messy, distributionally uneven and slow enough that the companies that paid may not be the companies that recover.
That lesson is immediately applicable. The Section 301 structure now carrying most of the tariff load rests on investigations with their own procedural vulnerabilities, and the Atlantic Council’s assessment of its fragility is not a fringe view in the trade bar. Importers rebuilding sourcing models on current effective rates should be asking the same question about the current regime that they failed to ask about the last one: what happens to my landed cost, my contracts and my recovery rights if this authority is narrowed.
The money moving out of Treasury starting today is the answer to that question for one statute. It is unlikely to be the last time it gets asked.