IEEPA Tariffs Were Struck Down. Here's How to Protect Your Refund Claim.

Every broker clearing US entries over the past two years has clients who paid the IEEPA tariffs. Now the question landing in your inbox is blunt: the Supreme Court threw those tariffs out, so where's the money?

The honest answer is that it does not come back on its own. And the entries where it can come back are exactly the ones you have to move on first.

Here is the sequence, because the timing drives everything. In February the Supreme Court revoked the sweeping tariffs the administration had imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, including the 10% global baseline duty. A Section 122 stopgap held the line for a few months and expired in July. On July 24 a new Section 301 regime took over, running 10% to 12.5% across roughly 60 economies, this time on forced-labor grounds. Within days, two importers filed at the Court of International Trade arguing the new rates just copy the invalidated IEEPA structure, and asking for them to be removed and refunded.

So there are two live refund questions now, not one. The old IEEPA duties your clients already paid, and the new Section 301 duties they are paying today that may go the same way.

Why the refund is not automatic

When a court invalidates a tariff, nobody at CBP runs a report and cuts checks. Refunds move through the same machinery every other duty adjustment does, and that machinery is keyed to the status of each individual entry.

Two buckets matter. Entries that have not yet liquidated are still open, which means the duty owed on them can still be corrected, and an importer who has flagged the issue is in position to be made whole when the dust settles. Entries that have already liquidated are closed, and getting money back out of a liquidated entry means filing a protest. The standard protest window runs 180 days from the date of liquidation. Miss it and the entry is final, whatever a court later says about the tariff.

That is the trap. A favorable ruling does not reopen entries that liquidated and went unprotested. The importer who did nothing because "the courts will sort it out" can watch the tariff get struck down and still recover nothing, because their entries closed while they waited.

What to actually do this week

Start by pulling every affected entry and sorting it by liquidation date. You are looking for two groups: entries that have already liquidated and are still inside the protest window, and entries approaching liquidation that you want to keep open. Many entries liquidate within about a year of entry, so a client who imported heavily under the IEEPA duties likely has a mix of both.

For entries still open, get the issue on the record. A post-summary correction or a flag on the entry preserves the position so a later refund has something to attach to. For entries that liquidated recently, calendar the 180-day protest deadline for each one and file before it lapses. These dates are per entry, not per client, so a portfolio-level assumption will lose money on the edges.

Then document the current Section 301 duties the same way. The Court of International Trade challenge is live, the importers are explicitly seeking refunds, and the argument that the new rates track the old invalidated structure is not frivolous. If those duties are eventually pulled, the importers who kept clean records and preserved their entries will be first in line, and the ones who treated it as noise will be reconstructing paperwork under a deadline. Treat every Section 301 payment now as a potential refund claim later.

The through-line on both waves is the same. Refund exposure lives at the entry level, the deadlines are unforgiving, and the broker who tracks liquidation dates is the one whose clients get paid.

If you want the moving pieces in one place, our IEEPA refund tools map entries against liquidation and protest deadlines so you can see which claims are still alive and which are about to close. We track the litigation and the tariff changes as they land in the trade-alerts feed, and there are more corridor breakdowns on the blog.

None of this is legal advice on any single entry, and the facts here come from the public reporting and the court filing linked above. But the operational takeaway holds regardless of how the litigation ends: the clients who get refunds are the ones whose broker was watching the liquidation calendar, not the ones who assumed the money would find its way home.

If you are triaging IEEPA and Section 301 exposure across a book of entries and want a faster way to see what is still recoverable, start here.

↗Source