8/19/26 — CBP Tells the Court It Cannot Launch CAPE Phase 3 and Offers No Opening Date

CBP has informed the Court of International Trade that it is unable to roll out Phase 3 of the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) refund system. The agency says it has allocated all available resources to resolving the problem, but it cannot provide a date when Phase 3 will open. More should be known at the upcoming status conference before Judge Richard Eaton.

Phase 3 is the final planned stage of CAPE and covers refunds of IEEPA duties on finally liquidated entries, a category CBP has estimated at roughly $11.4 billion. At the June 9 hearing, CBP told the court that Phase 3 would be ready by the end of July. That target has now come and gone without a launch, and the agency’s latest statement removes any timetable at all.

The first two phases deployed on schedule. Phase 1 opened on April 20 for standard entry summaries, and Phase 2 followed on June 29 for entries flagged for reconciliation where no Type 09 reconciliation entry was filed. Through those phases CBP has accepted more than 250,000 CAPE declarations covering roughly 25 million import entries, and as of the end of July approximately $100 billion in refunds had been certified and sent to Treasury for disbursement.

The Phase 3 delay does not stop everything. Under Judge Eaton’s July orders in V.O.S. Selections v. United States (CIT No. 25-00066) and the related CAPE cases, CBP is already directed to reliquidate finally liquidated entries and return IEEPA duties for the litigating plaintiffs across more than 3,700 individual cases through case specific procedure orders. What remains unbuilt is the broader Phase 3 functionality that would process finally liquidated entries for importers outside that litigation, the same group whose position is at issue in the pending class certification motion argued August 6 and in the government’s Federal Circuit challenge to universal relief for non parties.

The status conference should clarify what is actually broken, whether the obstacle is technical or budgetary, and whether Judge Eaton is prepared to set a deadline rather than wait for CBP to offer one. We will report on the conference when it occurs.