CAPE vs Protest priority, what would you do ?

Hi,

I heard that now filing CAPE & Protest at the same time are impossible. We need to file either one of them.

Final liquidation date would be Oct 2026.

Now our company has to file the protest for the auto part tariff and fight back.

We believe our commodity is not subject to auto part tariff but CBP recently sent us CF29 and explained we need to pay auto part tariff 25 %.

And these entries are eligible for IEEPA refunds.

Scenario 1.

We file the auto part protest firstly and then file CAPE in phase 2.

Risk : we don't know when we are going to have phase 2. We have risks that the entries get all finally liquidated before phase 2 comes.

=> Then we will lose the opportunity to get IEEPA refunds.

Scenario 2.

We file CAPE firstly and as soon as the refund gets received, we file the auto part tariff protest.

Risk : I don't even know if we can file CAPE now since CBP recently touched the entries by issuing CF29 and quick liquidation for the auto part tariff adjustment.

Even if we can file CAPE, if the refund cannot be finalized by Oct 2026, we lose the opportunity to protest for the auto part tariff.

=> This will potentially impact our business in a negative way

I believe our company has more risk on Scenario 2 so I might go with Scenario 1 but what would you do if you were me ?