Methodology

About this brief

The Approval Trends Brief publishes weekly snapshots of USCIS processing data covering 15 forms. Each issue summarizes the past 8 weeks of approval medians, breaks down by service center, and surfaces patterns the data reveals.

How we compute the numbers

Weekly medians are computed as the 50th percentile of filing to approval days for cases with a "Case Was Approved" status update in that ISO week. Service center breakdowns group by the center that issued the approval, not the original receipt center.

The 8 week slope is a linear regression over the most recent 8 weekly medians. R² indicates how well that line fits; values above 0.7 suggest a strong trend, between 0.4 and 0.7 a moderate one, below 0.4 noise.

The 4 week forecast extrapolates the 8 week slope. It is a mechanical projection, not a prediction of policy or shocks.

Data sources

Source data: USCIS Case Status pages, scraped daily via our tracking infrastructure. Approximately 600,000+ active cases tracked across all forms.

About AI assisted sections

Some narrative sections are generated by an AI assistant and reviewed against rubric scores before publication.

Sections 4 and 9 of each issue, plus the headline and lede, are generated by an AI assistant using only the data context summarized above. The output is reviewed by an automated critic against eight quality dimensions before publication; drafts that fail are rewritten or fall back to template text.

Questions or corrections

Found a number that seems wrong, or a claim you would like to challenge? Email briefs@mycaseshub.com.