US Customs and Border Protection has confirmed that tariff repayments tied to Trump-era measures will not be issued immediately, even where eligibility is clear. Instead, refunds will only be made at the liquidation stage of an entry’s lifecycle.
In an update to the Court of International Trade, CBP said that once an entry is accepted into the new process, liquidation — and therefore payment — could still take up to 45 days. The agency also confirmed that entries liquidated within the last 80 days may be reconsidered, with reliquidation to be completed by day 90.
Claims will be handled through CBP’s CAPE platform, short for Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries. The declaration portal, which is the first stage of the system, is said to be around 85 percent complete. Other components remain less advanced, with several modules in the 60 to 80 percent range.
One area still lagging is mass processing, currently at around 60 percent completion. Development work has recently focused on enabling edits to entry summaries, improving historical tracking and finalising a validation tool.
CBP still expects CAPE to open for declarations by 20 April, while the Court of International Trade has requested another progress report by 14 April.
The system’s scope has also widened. Initial intake will now cover suspended, extended and under-review entries, as well as warehouse withdrawals. According to CBP, this broader eligibility should not affect delivery schedules.
Even so, the current design of the bulk-processing function is still limited. It was initially built only for unliquidated entries, but a subsequent court revision now requires CBP to include finally liquidated entries as well. That capability will only be added after launch.
At rollout, CAPE is expected to cover about 63 percent of entries affected by IEEPA duties. Electronic payments will remain the default. CBP says nearly 27,000 importers have already registered for digital refunds, representing 78 percent of affected entries and about US$120 billion in tariff payments.
