CBP opens CAPE portal for coffee tariff refund claims, phase one begins

Green coffee importers finally have a formal path to claw back IEEPA tariff money, but the first wave is tightly limited and the cash will not hit accounts anytime soon. U.S. Customs and Border Protection opened Phase 1 of its Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries tool inside the ACE Portal on April 20, giving coffee buyers, roasters and their brokers a way to begin refund claims on qualifying shipments.

The launch matters because CAPE is not an automatic payout machine. CBP says the system consolidates refunds of IEEPA duties, including interest, instead of forcing companies to chase each entry one by one. For now, Phase 1 covers only certain unliquidated entries and certain entries within 80 days of liquidation. Final-liquidation entries are excluded, and only the importer of record or the customs broker that originally filed the entries may submit the claim. Filing runs through a CSV upload in the CAPE tab, and each submission can contain up to 9,999 entry numbers.

For coffee companies, the money question is straightforward: what was actually paid during the disputed tariff window, and what can be recovered now? Coffee-related coverage says green coffee was subject to IEEPA tariffs from April 5, 2025 through November 12, 2025, the day before a later executive action exempting coffee took effect. Tariffs paid outside that window are not eligible for these refunds. That puts a hard ceiling on the possible recovery and makes shipment-level records the difference between a real claim and a dead end.

The legal trigger came on February 20, 2026, when the Supreme Court in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump held that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs. That ruling gave importers the opening they had been waiting for after months of pricing whiplash and planning headaches. President Donald J. Trump’s reciprocal-tariff executive order had been issued on April 2, 2025 and took effect on April 5, 2025, setting up the tariff regime that coffee businesses are now trying to unwind.

The relief is real, but the timeline is slow. CBP says declaration acceptance typically takes about 10 days, which suggests the first validated refunds could arrive roughly 70 to 100 days after filing if nothing gets hung up. CBP also says the process is being rolled out in phases, so more complicated cases should come later.

The stakes could be large enough to move margins across the trade. One advisory estimate put total IEEPA duties collected from April 2025 through February 2026 at about $166 billion across more than 330,000 importers and 53 million shipments. In coffee, Portland Coffee Roasters said it sought about $370,000 in refunds, while Royal Coffee had already filed and said it was ready to move as soon as the money is released. For importers and roasters, CAPE is the first real operational relief after a year of tariff uncertainty, but the benefit arrives through paperwork first, cash second.