This post is adapted from Processing Backlogs in the U.S. Immigration System: Describing the Scale of the Problem
The Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (DHS-USCIS) is the gatekeeper for the broadest array of immigration benefits, including employment authorization and applications for green cards by immigrants already in the United States (see Table below). This broad jurisdiction makes the DHS-USCIS backlog the most important among the four departments with immigration processing authority. The DHS-USCIS backlog of pending cases has grown more than fourfold from fiscal year 2010 to FY 22—from 2 million in the second quarter of 2010 to 8.8 million in the third quarter of 2022. This 6.8 million increase represents growth from about the number of cases received in a quarter at the end of FY 10 to the number of cases received in a year in FY 22 (Figure 1).
Figure 2 breaks down the DHS-USCIS backlog by broad type of benefit being sought from 2010 to 2022 (quarter 2 in each year only). Every category of immigration benefits has seen significant increases in the number of pending cases. At 2 million cases, the largest component of the backlog is family‐based petitions—a backlog that has increased by 1.3 million since 2010. Employment authorization documents (EADs, or work permits) are second at 1.5 million pending cases, with asylum applicants and immigrants with pending green card applications the most common EAD applicants.
About 1.2 million applicants await humanitarian statuses, with asylum, temporary protected status, and nonimmigrant status for crime victims leading this category. Nearly 900,000 legal permanent residents are trying to replace or renew a green card. Naturalization and citizenship applications are the fifth‐largest group, with over 850,000 pending cases. New green card applications (or adjustments of status to permanent residence) comprise nearly 800,000 cases. Travel authorization exceeds 530,000 applications. There are almost 179,000 employer petitions. Other types of benefit petitions (mainly waivers of grounds of inadmissibility and changes or extensions of nonimmigrant status) number almost 560,000.
The table shows the growth in backlogs from 2010 to 2022 by detailed form type. By far, the biggest change has been in the number of pending EADs, which increased more than tenfold from fewer than 150,000 in 2010 to over 1.5 million in 2022. This category alone accounts for 21 percent of the backlog increase. This makes sense because employment authorization is often triggered when other applications are delayed. Delayed applications for green cards (443,159) and asylum (397,650) are the most backlogged categories for employment authorization, making this a backlog within a backlog.
Over one million of those cases have been added to the backlog since 2016. A similarly startling increase has occurred for legal permanent residents applying to replace or renew a green card. Regulations require that green cards be renewed every 10 years, and the 888,550-person backlog represents nearly an entire year’s worth of applicants receiving legal permanent residence in the United States.
The backlog is causing wait times for benefits to increase dramatically. DHS-USCIS’s reporting on wait times is often difficult to parse because it focuses primarily on the median for completed cases. By not disclosing the average, the agency can keep the longest‐delayed cases from influencing the measure of processing delays. Moreover, the agency can carry over a huge number of extremely long‐pending cases without affecting its performance measure. Recently, however, DHS-USCIS has started to publish more‐detailed processing data, which reveal the wide variance in outcomes even for a single application type in a single year.
Figure 3 shows the median processing times for 2012 to 2022 and the 80th and 93rd percentiles at the most‐delayed filing locations for August 2022 for selected form types. Figure A beneath it shows an even more complete picture of processing times. By themselves, the increases in the medians would be staggering. The average of the median processing times across all forms for which DHS-USCIS reports data increased threefold—from less than 4 months in 2012 to over a year in 2022. However, the 80th percentile at the most‐delayed locations was more than double the average at 27 months, and 20 percent of applicants at those locations waited even longer. The I‑90 form to replace or renew a green card shows how slippery the DHS-USCIS’s focus on the median processing time is (second row of Figure 3). The I‑90 median wait is just 1 month, the 80th percentile is 15 months, and the 93rd over 20 months—15 to 20 times as long.
Figure A shows how wait times have increased in numerous categories.
