CAPE Phase 2 Is Live, Phase 3 Only Pays People Who Sued: The August 2026 IEEPA Refund Status Check

## CAPE Phase 2 Is Live, Phase 3 Only Pays People Who Sued: The August 2026 IEEPA Refund Status Check

If you have been waiting since spring for CBP's IEEPA refund process to reach your entries, the situation on the ground in August looks nothing like the roadmap the trade was working from in April.

Back then the working assumption - including in our own April coverage - was straightforward: Phase 1 would handle unliquidated and recently liquidated entries, Phase 2 would pick up the older liquidated entries left behind, and Phase 3 would mop up the complex cases sometime in Q4. That is not what happened.

Phase 2 launched June 29, 2026 - and it is about reconciliation, not old liquidations. Phase 3 began rolling out in late July for finally liquidated entries - and access is currently conditioned on having filed suit at the Court of International Trade. For a large number of importers, those two facts together mean the phase they were waiting for has come and gone without covering them.

This article is a status check: what each phase actually covers as of today, which bucket your entries sit in, and what the realistic options are for the importers still without a filing path.

The Numbers, For Scale

The IEEPA refund pool is roughly $166 billion in duties paid or deposited by approximately 330,000 importers across more than 53 million entries. As of early June, CBP had accepted close to $95 billion of that into CAPE, the overwhelming majority through Phase 1.

Phase 2 adds an estimated $28.7 billion across roughly 2.8 million entries. That is a meaningful expansion, but it does not close the gap - the finally liquidated population sitting in Phase 3 is where much of the remaining balance lives, and that is precisely the population with a lawsuit precondition attached.

Phase 1: Still Open, Still the Cleanest Path

Phase 1 has not closed. It continues to cover:

- Unliquidated entries - the cleanest case, no complications. - Entries liquidated within 80 days of the CAPE declaration filing date - inside the 180-day protest window under 19 U.S.C. § 1514, which is why CBP could process them administratively without a court order.

The 80-day window still slides daily. Every week that passes drops another tranche of liquidations out of Phase 1 eligibility. If you have entries approaching that boundary, filing this week rather than next week is not a rounding error - it is the difference between an administrative refund and a materially harder path.

Filing mechanics have not changed since launch. See our CAPE declaration filing checklist for the step-by-step, and the top validation failures if your declaration has been rejected.

Phase 2 (Live June 29): Reconciliation-Flagged Entries

Here is the piece almost nobody predicted. Phase 2 did not extend the liquidation window. It opened CAPE to reconciliation-flagged entries.

Specifically, importers and authorized customs brokers can now include in their CAPE declarations entry types 01, 02, and 06 that were flagged for reconciliation, but for which the reconciliation entry (entry type 09) has not yet been filed. The same eligibility fence from Phase 1 still applies underneath: the flagged entries must be unliquidated, or liquidated within 80 days.

The sequencing matters and is easy to get backwards:

1. The flagged entries are accepted onto a CAPE declaration first. 2. CAPE strips the IEEPA duties out of those entries before the reconciliation entry is filed. 3. Then the trade files the type 09 reconciliation entry.

The effect is to separate the IEEPA refund from the reconciliation calculation entirely, so the two processes do not collide. If your broker files the reconciliation entry first, you have made the refund harder, not easier - the IEEPA amounts get folded into a calculation CAPE was designed to keep them out of.

Who this actually helps: importers running reconciliation programs for value, classification, 9802, or post-importation FTA claims - which skews toward higher-volume, more sophisticated filers. If you flag entries for reconciliation as a matter of course, talk to your broker this week about sequencing. If you do not use reconciliation at all, Phase 2 does nothing for you.

Phase 3 (Rolling Out Late July): Finally Liquidated Entries - With a Catch

Phase 3 is the one the majority of stranded importers were waiting for, because it addresses finally liquidated entries - the entries that aged out of the 80-day window and had no administrative path.

CBP told the Court of International Trade at a June 9, 2026 hearing that Phase 3 programming would be ready in late July, and the rollout began roughly on schedule. But the access condition is the story:

As of the late-July rollout, Phase 3 is available to importers who have filed suit at the Court of International Trade. The CIT's July 15 order directs CBP to reliquidate certain finally liquidated entries with IEEPA refunds in connection with the Phase 3 launch, covering approximately 3,700 companies with IEEPA-related cases on file.

Read that number against the 330,000 importers who paid IEEPA duties. Roughly one percent of the affected population has the litigation posture that currently unlocks Phase 3.

This is not CBP being arbitrary. Finally liquidated entries are legally final - absent a protest filed inside the 180-day window or a court order, CBP does not have unilateral authority to reopen them. The court order is the mechanism that makes reliquidation lawful. The practical consequence is still the same: if your entries are finally liquidated, you did not protest in time, and you have no case at the CIT, Phase 3 as currently constituted does not reach you.

Two things to watch. First, the government has appealed the CIT's refund order, so the legal foundation under Phase 3 is not settled. Second, the court has noted ongoing discussions about additional CAPE functionality for entries with open protests - which, if it materializes, would be the single most important development for importers who protested but never sued.

Which Bucket Are You In?

Work through this in order:

1. Any entries still unliquidated? Phase 1. File now. This is free money with a clean legal basis.

2. Any entries liquidated within the last 80 days? Phase 1, but on a clock. Check liquidation dates against the sliding window on the actual day you file, not the day you build the list.

3. Do you flag entries for reconciliation, with the type 09 not yet filed? Phase 2. Coordinate the sequencing with your broker before anyone files the reconciliation entry.

4. Entries finally liquidated, and you have a case at the CIT? Phase 3. Your counsel should already be coordinating with CBP on the reliquidation list.

5. Entries finally liquidated, protest filed, no CIT case? Holding pattern. The protest preserves your rights and is the reason you are still in the conversation at all. Watch for the open-protest CAPE functionality the court flagged.

6. Entries finally liquidated, no protest, no case? This is the hard bucket. Your remaining options are a CIT action of your own - which is what unlocked Phase 3 for the 3,700 - weighed against the cost of litigation, or waiting to see whether CBP extends administrative relief further than it currently has.

A word on that last bucket: a protest under 19 U.S.C. § 1514 must be filed within 180 days of liquidation. If any of your entries liquidated inside that window, the protest is cheap, fast, and worth filing today even though it will likely sit unresolved. It is the difference between bucket 5 and bucket 6.

Reconciling which entries fall where means pulling IEEPA Chapter 99 duty amounts line by line across potentially thousands of entries, and the answer depends on liquidation dates that your ACE data has and your accounting system usually does not. Importers doing this at scale often lean on landed-cost and duty-data tooling such as Zonos to line up duty-by-line against entry records before their broker builds the declaration. (Disclosure: this is an affiliate link - FreightFigures may earn a commission if you sign up, at no additional cost to you. See our full affiliate disclosure.) For anything approaching litigation, that reconciliation should be reviewed by customs counsel, not automated.

What to Do This Week

1. Re-pull your entry list with current liquidation dates. The 80-day window moved since the last time you looked. Entries you wrote off in June may still be inside it, and entries you were counting on may not be. 2. Ask your broker one specific question: "Which of my entries are flagged for reconciliation with the type 09 not yet filed?" That is the Phase 2 list, and it is not a list most importers have at hand. 3. Do not let the reconciliation entry go in first on anything you intend to run through CAPE. 4. Check the 180-day protest clock on every finally liquidated entry. File the cheap insurance where the window is still open. 5. If you are in bucket 6 with material dollars, get a cost-benefit read from customs counsel now rather than after the appeal resolves. The 3,700 companies in Phase 3 are there because they filed. 6. Do not file a Post-Summary Correction as a workaround. CBP's guidance remains that IEEPA-specific refunds route through CAPE, and unrelated filings can delay the eventual refund rather than accelerate it.

The Bottom Line

The refund is real, CBP is paying, and roughly $95 billion has already moved through the process. But the phased rollout has quietly sorted importers into two groups: those whose entries happened to be unliquidated, recently liquidated, or reconciliation-flagged - who get an administrative path - and those whose entries went final, who now need either a protest already on file or a lawsuit to get in the door.

Which group you are in was largely determined months ago by liquidation timing you did not control. What you still control is whether you know which group you are in, and whether you act inside the windows that remain open. Check your dates this week.

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