USCIS has an unprecedented backlog of 729,000 naturalization applications pending nationwide with average waiting time of 11 months and in some states average around 17 months.
Congress has requested USCIS additional resources and increase capacity to process naturalization application. Congress wrote a letter to USCIS saying the backlog of applications undermines public trust and must be meaningfully addressed.
USCIS responded to Congress with the following..
- Naturalization processing times. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) remains committed to timely and accurate adjudications. Additionally, we remain focused on process improvement and employee development while at the same time combatting instances of fraud, abuse, and other activities threatening the integrity of our nation’s immigration system.
- We have experienced an increase in the number of pending naturalization applications and a subsequently elevated N-400 application cycle time. Both of these are the result of higher than projected application receipts in Fiscal Year (FY) 2017. Projected volume for FY 2017 was 853,292 and actual receipts were 986,460 which is 13.5 percent higher than we anticipated. Unlike the previous presidential election cycle where receipts dropped by 14 percent in the year following the election, they actually increased from FY 2016 to FY 2017.
- Despite the increase in receipts over the last 2 years, USCIS has been able to increase N-400 application completion levels over those prior to FY 2016 without sacrificing the quality of our adjudications. In FY 2016, USCIS adjudicated approximately 829,000 naturalization applications and in FY 2017, USCIS adjudicated approximately 790,000 of them. These numbers are in line with previous fiscal years, and both years’ totals are above the average for the 5 prior years.
- USCIS remains focused on meeting a processing goal of 5 months for the Form N-400. We have not changed this goal and have continued to leverage available resources to improve wait times. Given the increase in filings in the recent past, reaching this goal in FY 2018 is simply not possible. We continue to add staff and seek to maximize use of our existing facilities where possible. In the last 3 fiscal years, USCIS Field Operations Directorate (FOD) has increased its use of overtime by approximately 65 percent.
- At the same time, we have expanded the authorized workforce for FOD by approximately 18 percent since FY 2015, and currently 96 percent of our authorized staffing positions are filled. We have initiated process redesign efforts to lower cycle times by identifying process efficiencies and quality enhancements and shifted adjudication priorities to address high priority caseloads. Additionally, in the past 2 years, USCIS opened 2 new field offices in Montgomery, Alabama and Nashville, Tennessee and has expanded office space at 10 existing facilities.
Read more here: uscis.gov
