CAPE Is Live — and the Clock Is Now Running

An update on the IEEPA refund process, what CBP told the Court of International Trade on April 28, and what importers need to do now.

On April 20, 2026, U.S. Customs and Border Protection opened the front door on what may be the largest duty refund process in modern U.S. trade history. The Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries — CAPE — went live at 8:00 a.m. ET that morning inside the ACE Portal, giving importers and licensed customs brokers a direct electronic mechanism to request refunds of duties paid under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. (CBP CSMS #68340863)

Eight days later, on April 28, CBP filed its first court-ordered status report on the Phase 1 rollout with the U.S. Court of International Trade. The numbers tell a story worth paying attention to. (Sourcing Journal)

What the April 28 Status Report Said

Brandon Lord, CBP’s Executive Director of Trade Programs, is required to report directly to the CIT on Phase 1 progress. His April 28 declaration in Euro-Notions Florida, Inc. v. United States (Court No. 25-00595, before Senior Judge Richard K. Eaton) showed:

• 75,306 CAPE Declarations filed as of 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, April 26 — with 47,315 designated as properly filed.
• 11.2 million entries submitted through the system in under a week.
• Approximately 21% accepted at the file-validation stage; about 
• 3% — roughly 1.74 million entries — had reached the refund stage of the process.
• The system experienced a single 18-minute pause on launch day to reconfigure resources, and has been continuously available since.
• First refunds are expected to land in importer accounts by May 11, 2026.

In the filing, Lord stated that “the CAPE functionality is working successfully.” Judge Eaton, however, raised lingering concerns at a closed-door conference held the same day — including ACE login problems following forced password resets, oversubscribed CAPE training sessions, and confusion among trade members about which party should actually file a CAPE Declaration. The Judge has ordered CBP to file a follow-up progress report on May 12. (Sourcing Journal)

What Phase 1 Actually Covers — and What It Doesn’t

CAPE is being rolled out in phases. Phase 1 is intentionally narrow. It accepts only:

• Certain unliquidated entries, and
• Certain entries within 80 days of liquidation (to align with the 90-day voluntary reliquidation window).

CBP estimates Phase 1 captures roughly 63% of entries that had IEEPA duties imposed. Excluded from Phase 1 — and pushed to later phases or alternative remedies — are reconciliation entries, entries flagged for AD/CVD, suspended entries, and entries for which liquidation is final. (CBP Trade Information Notice)

In aggregate, the universe is enormous. Court filings put the total at approximately 330,000 importers, around $166 billion in IEEPA duties, and more than 53 million entries. (Abasto)

Who Can Actually File a CAPE Declaration

This is the part that is generating the most confusion in the trade community right now, and it is the most important operational point in this entire piece.

Only the Importer of Record (IOR) — or the licensed customs broker who actually filed the original entry — can file a CAPE Declaration on those entries.There is no third-party workaround. A different broker cannot file CAPE on entries they did not transmit. A consultant or service provider cannot file on an importer’s behalf without being the original filer or operating directly through the IOR’s ACE sub-account. (CBP IEEPA Duty Refunds page)

In practical terms: if Future Forwarding filed your entries, we file your CAPE Declaration. If a different broker filed them, that broker has to file. And if you are the IOR filing direct, the work falls to your team and your ACE Portal access.

The 60–90 Day Refund Window — and the One Thing That Will Stop It

Once a CAPE Declaration is validated and accepted, CBP expects valid IEEPA refunds (including statutory interest) to be issued within 60 to 90 days, unless a compliance concern requires further review. ACE strips the IEEPA Chapter 99 HTS provisions and corresponding duties from the entry, recalculates the duty owed without those codes, and CBP liquidates or reliquidates accordingly. (CBP IEEPA Duty Refunds page)

There is one operational issue that can stop the entire flow before it starts: refund banking setup.

CBP refunds under CAPE are issued by ACH, tied to bank account information stored in the IOR’s ACE Portal account. If your ACE account is not active, or if your ACH refund details are not properly registered, even a fully accepted CAPE Declaration can stall at the payment stage. We covered this in detail in our earlier piece — 

IEEPA Refunds: What Importers Need to Know — and Do — Right Now — and that guidance is now more urgent, not less. If you have not confirmed that your ACE Portal Importer sub-account is set up and that your ACH refund banking is current, that is the single most important thing on your desk this week.

What This Looks Like From Where We Sit

The April 28 numbers are encouraging in one direction and sobering in another. Encouraging: the system held up under enormous early-week volume, and refunds are beginning to move. Sobering: only about 3% of submitted entries have reached the refund stage so far, and 19% of entries that passed file validation were ultimately rejected at the entry-validation stage. (Sourcing Journal)

This is not a “file and forget” process. CBP has made clear that CAPE is the front end of a review and validation pipeline — not a passive payout system. Submissions with classification errors, valuation inconsistencies, country-of-origin issues, or tariff-stacking complications (Section 232, Section 301) are precisely the ones that get caught at validation or flagged for post-refund audit. The importers moving cleanly through CAPE are the ones who audited their entry data before they uploaded a single CSV. (Baker Tilly)

There are also strategic considerations worth flagging. CAPE-processed refunds remain available to offset other duties owed, which means importers with disputed liabilities elsewhere on their ACE record need to think carefully about sequencing. CBP will not process CAPE entries that are also under protest. And the broader litigation question is far from settled: the government has until approximately June 7 to appeal Judge Eaton’s underlying refund order, and is widely expected to do so. (Snell & Wilmer)

What to Do This Week

1. Confirm your ACE Portal account is active and that you have the Importer sub-account assigned correctly.
2. Verify ACH refund banking is current. Refunds will not be issued by paper check.
3. Identify which of your entries were filed by Future Forwarding. Those are the ones we can file CAPE on directly.
4. Pull your IEEPA exposure. Filter ACE’s Entry Summary Details Report (ES-003) on HTSUS Chapter 99 provisions 9903.01.XX and 9903.02.XX.
5. Decide your filing approach. Test-submit a small set of unliquidated entries before bulk-uploading large batches.
6. Track the May 12 progress report. That filing will tell us how the system is holding up at scale and whether Phase 2 timelines start to come into focus.

Talk to Future Forwarding About Your CAPE Filings

If Future Forwarding filed your entries, we are already positioned to prepare and submit your CAPE Declaration on your behalf. If you’re unsure which of your entries qualify for Phase 1, or you want a second set of eyes on your refund exposure before you file, contact your Future Forwarding representative to learn more about filing a CAPE Declaration and what we can do to make sure your refunds move cleanly through the system.