I-821 Final-Stage Wait Jumps 33 Days in a Single Week, Triggering Outlier Flag

The week of May 18 produced a 446-day median for I-821 (Application for Temporary Protected Status) final-stage waits, a 33-day gain from the prior week's 413 days. An outlier flag fired at z = 2.36, computed against the prior 4-week trailing mean. That places this week's reading at the upper edge of the 12-week range, which has otherwise spanned 380 to 450 days. The 8-week regression slope is +1.4 days per week, but the R² of 0.02 means that slope is statistically indistinguishable from noise: the trend line explains almost none of the week-to-week movement. Single-week readings this high in a noisy series often revert in subsequent weeks, particularly when the approval sample is thin. This week's 167 approved cases is below the 200-case level where weekly variance becomes more reliably interpretable.

The weekly median describes only the cases that reached approval. A wider look at the I-821 pipeline shows that approvals represent a small share of system activity. In April 2025, 4,831 cases were terminated versus 735 approved; in May 2025, 3,540 were terminated versus only 114 approved. Here "terminated" refers to the administrative closure of a case when a country's TPS country designation ends, a process distinct from denial. The dominant status in recent IOE (electronic filing) activity is "terminated," appearing in 6,045 transitions over the last 30 days. The practical implication is that the pool of cases feeding weekly approval medians is a small residual drawn from a much larger queue shaped by terminations, making those weekly medians more sensitive to compositional variation than they would be in a higher-volume approval environment.

Looking at stage durations (raw 30-day window), cases showing "Case Is Still Being Processed By USCIS" account for 29,648 cases, or 56.4% of all staged cases, with a median of 252 days at that status (25th percentile 196 days, 75th percentile 299 days). Cases at "Case Was Received and A Receipt Notice Was Sent" number 14,638, representing 27.9% of staged cases, with a median of 192 days (25th percentile 144 days, 75th percentile 244 days). Together these two processing stages account for more than 84% of staged cases, and neither group has yet advanced to an adjudication (the USCIS case decision step where approval, denial, or a request for additional information is issued). The approved stage, covering 3,317 cases, shows a median of 480 days at that status, reflecting how long ago those cases were effectively decided before the formal approval notice issued.

Filing-month cohort (cases filed in the same calendar month) data presents a consistent picture for 2026 filers: essentially none have been approved yet. Every group filed between January and May 2026 sits at 0% approved, with February 2026 the lone partial exception at 2.6% (2 of 76 cases) at age 16 weeks. The December 2025 group stands at 2.3% approved (2 of 87 cases) after 25 weeks. These rates are in line with expected pacing: at a median final-stage wait near 446 days (roughly 64 weeks), groups at ages 3 to 25 weeks would not be expected to show material clearance. The low percentages reflect timing, not an unusual backlog of pending cases accumulating beyond historical norms.

The active pending count tracked across these six filing-month groups rose by 34 cases, or 12.6%, over the 18 days ending May 25, reaching 304 active cases in total across the tracked cohorts. The April 2026 group showed the largest single-cohort growth, adding 11 active cases over that window. New filings are entering the pending queue at a pace that the current approval rate has not matched. To keep the scale clear: the 304 figure covers only the six most recent filing-month groups in the cohort tracker, not the full I-821 pending backlog of cases across all months.

Even the furthest-along group tracked, December 2025 filers at 25 weeks, has seen only 2 of 87 cases approved: a pace that matches a median wait of more than a year.