DOJ Moves to Narrow IEEPA Tariff Refunds: What Merchants Should Watch

The fight over IEEPA tariff refunds entered a new phase last week. On May 29, the Department of Justice filed a motion to amend the Court of International Trade’s April 17 refund order, taking direct aim at the part that matters most to merchants: who actually gets their money back. 

What happened 

The CIT’s subsequent series of rulings  applied universally, covering all importers, with IEEPA duties on the books, named plaintiff or not. That universal scope is what produced the CAPE declaration process CBP now uses to handle claims. 

The DOJ wants to shrink that scope. The government has signaled it will appeal the universal injunction and seek a stay that would limit refunds two ways: 

1. To the actual plaintiffs named in each case heard by the CIT, rather than every importer nationwide. 

1. To unliquidated and non-final liquidated entries only, leaving finally liquidated entries out unless a court orders otherwise. 

The legal argument leans on Trump v. CASA, where the Supreme Court restricted nationwide injunctions. The DOJ contends the CIT exceeded its jurisdiction by ordering CBP to reliquidate final entries for importers with no pending lawsuit. 

Where the deadline sits 

The government’s deadline to appeal the universal refund order is June 6, and it’s widely expected to do so. A separate June 9 hearing will weigh whether the CIT lifts its suspension on the broader injunction. 

Worth noting: the appeal itself does not pause refunds. CBP is still processing CAPE submissions and has already refunded roughly $85 billion in IEEPA duties on unliquidated and non-final entries, more than half the total collected. 

Why this is a compliance-timing problem, not just a legal one 

For merchants, the stakes split along a single line: did you file your own case, and where do your entries sit in the liquidation cycle? If the stay holds and the appeal succeeds, importers who never sued and whose entries have finally liquidated could lose their refund path entirely. That’s not a hypothetical you want to discover after the window closes. 

These changes keep coming. US de minimis, the UK’s £135 threshold removal, the EU customs reform, and now the scope of IEEPA refunds. Whether a merchant recovers a margin or absorbs the cost usually depends on having entry data, classification, and filings in order ahead of the deadline rather than scrambling after the fact. Compliance is the most common reason brands hold back from international expansion, and it is the part FlavorCloud manages on their behalf. 

FlavorCloud’s read 

There are no impacts to FlavorCloud merchants or to our process right now. The refund mechanism is intact, CAPE is running, and nothing about the current shipping or compliance flow changes today. 

We’re tracking the June 6 appeal and the June 9 hearing closely. If anything shifts the refund landscape in a way that touches merchant operations, we’ll follow up with the specific takeaways that matter for your shipments. 

International growth compounds when the compliance layer holds steady through this kind of volatility. That’s the layer we run, so you don’t have to. 

FlavorCloud is the AI-native, compliance-ready Cross-Border Commerce OS. We close the gap between the 10 to 20 percent of revenue most brands earn internationally and the 40 to 60 percent the leaders reach.