Legal Group Launches Free Lawsuits to Unlock IEEPA Tariff Refunds

Importers still owed money from the $166 billion collected under the now-defunct IEEPA tariff scheme have a new route to recovery: the Liberty Justice Center announced Thursday it will file and fully fund individual lawsuits for small businesses that can't otherwise force refunds out of the federal government.

The non-profit public interest law firm — the same group that represented small business plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case against President Donald Trump's International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs — is calling the platform Operation Refund Rescue. It targets a specific gap in the refund machinery: entries that have reached final liquidation (the point at which Customs and Border Protection deems a duty entry settled and no longer changeable).

Who qualifies?

The framework covers businesses that meet three conditions, according to the group:

• They paid into the IEEPA tariffs.
• Their entries have reached final liquidation.
• They are not eligible for refunds through CBP's CAPE process (the Customs and Border Protection portal handling post-ruling refunds).

For those importers, the only path to repayment has been filing their own suit in the U.S. Court of International Trade, which first ruled against the administration's tariff agenda in spring 2025. That route runs $10,000 to $50,000 in legal fees — sometimes more than the refund itself is worth. For many small importers, that math kills the claim outright.

The Liberty Justice Center says it will file an individual lawsuit on the qualifying business's behalf, seek the court order needed to establish eligibility for reliquidation (the legal mechanism that reopens a liquidated entry so a duty can be reassessed and refunded), guide the business through the subsequent CAPE steps, and cover all court fees and legal expenses.

What does the refund landscape actually look like?

CBP's established protocol has worked for many. As of Oct. 2, the agency had accepted roughly $136.6 billion in potential and certified IEEPA tariff refunds through CAPE, and had sent $126 billion to the Treasury Department for disbursement, according to figures cited by the group. But a significant number of businesses remain unpaid, and the stuck cohort overlaps heavily with the finally-liquidated entries the new program addresses.

"We launched Operation Refund Rescue because eight months after the Supreme Court ruled these tariffs unlawful, small businesses are still being forced to file individual federal lawsuits just to recover their own money," Sara Albrecht, chairman and CEO of the Liberty Justice Center, told Sourcing Journal.

Albrecht frames the liquidation problem as structural, not procedural. "Under the current refund process, importers with certain finally liquidated entries cannot access Phase 3 refunds through CAPE without first obtaining a court order," she said. "That's not a technical problem with the portal. It's a legal barrier that can cost a small business thousands of dollars to overcome."

A two-tier refund market?

Her sharpest point concerns who is actually getting paid. "The government lost this case, yet it continues to fight broader refund relief," Albrecht said. "Meanwhile, businesses that can afford attorneys are moving forward, while those with smaller refund claims risk being left behind."

Operation Refund Rescue is the group's answer to that asymmetry: narrowly targeted litigation, at no cost to the claimant, to obtain court-ordered relief. Albrecht is blunt about the absurdity of the arrangement. "We shouldn't have to do this, and small businesses shouldn't have to sue the government again to recover money it unlawfully collected," she said.

What should sourcing teams do now?

For importers with finally liquidated IEEPA entries and refund claims too small to justify $10,000-plus in counsel, the calculus has changed: the cost barrier just dropped to zero. Audit your entry records against the three qualifying criteria, and act soon — reliquidation deadlines and court timelines don't pause while you decide.