The Clock Is Running Out on IEEPA Refund Suits

If your business paid IEEPA duties in the first half of 2025, the deadline to sue for a refund on them may already be on the calendar. Trade lawyers are now flagging a two-year statute of limitations that starts closing on individual Court of International Trade suits as soon as February 2027 for China-sourced entries, with Canada and Mexico close behind in March and the broader "reciprocal" tariffs in April (National Law Review, Troutman Pepper Locke).

That's not a CBP processing deadline you can wait out. It's a hard legal cutoff, and it lands while CBP's own refund program and a newly certified class action are both still working through a massive backlog — which is exactly why it's easy to assume you're covered when you might not be.

CBP's CAPE program has already pushed more than $136 billion in IEEPA duties back out the door as of early October (see our Oct. 17 coverage), and on Oct. 8 a CIT judge certified a mandatory class action, Freestyle World, Inc. v. United States, covering importers who paid IEEPA duties between Feb. 1, 2025 and Feb. 19, 2026 and haven't filed a suit of their own (see our Oct. 13 coverage). On paper, that sounds like most importers are covered no matter what they do next.

In practice, two things complicate that. First, CAPE Phase 3 — the part of CBP's refund machinery that handles finally liquidated entries — is open only to importers who already filed a CIT suit and submitted their importer-of-record information by a July 30 cutoff; it does nothing for anyone who hasn't sued. Second, the Supreme Court's 2025 ruling in Trump v. CASA limited courts to ordering relief for actual parties in a case, which is part of why the class certification matters so much — but whether that certification pauses the individual filing clock for class members who sit tight is untested in this litigation. A related doctrine, known as American Pipe tolling, generally pauses individual deadlines for people covered by a pending class action, but the Supreme Court narrowed it in 2018 to block follow-on class actions filed after an earlier one failed, and no court has yet said how it applies to a mandatory IEEPA refund class like this one. An importer who assumes "the class will cover me" and lets the statute of limitations run risks finding out the hard way that it didn't.

The deadline comes from 28 U.S.C. § 2636(i), which bars a civil action in the CIT's residual jurisdiction unless it's filed "within two years after the cause of action first accrues." For an IEEPA tariff challenge, trade counsel say that clock runs from the date the duties were deposited — not the date of liquidation, and not the date the Supreme Court ruled that IEEPA didn't authorize the fentanyl and "reciprocal" tariffs in the first place (Feb. 20, 2026). That timing matters because an importer's entries can sit unliquidated for a year or more after the duties are paid, so the filing clock is already running well before a protest or a refund request would even be possible.

Because those tariffs rolled out country by country through 2025, the filing deadline rolls out the same way.

A joint scheduling order in Freestyle World is due Oct. 22 and should spell out next steps, including how and when class members get notice. The government's pending Federal Circuit appeal of the underlying CIT injunction — expected to keep moving through the fall — could also reshape the refund landscape well before any of these statute-of-limitations windows close: a loss for the government would strengthen every importer's refund claim, sued or not, while a win would complicate things for everyone currently banking on CAPE or the class to deliver.

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