U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is facing a massive backlog of 11.6 million immigration cases, leaving green card applicants and others in limbo as processing times become unpredictable.
Denver — U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Case Backlog The number of pending cases has more than tripled in the past decade, from 3.5 million cases in 2016 to 11.6 million in 2025.
The backlog leaves green card applicants, Temporary Protected Status holders and immigrant workers facing unpredictable wait times, which lawyers and academics say jeopardizes the legal status of those who follow the law.
American Immigration Council releases interactive Dashboard Compiling data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service shows that processing capacity is increasingly lagging behind incoming applications. At the current pace, it will take 13.8 months to clear the existing backlog, and no new cases will be filed.
immigration lawyer Ian LochsteinHaving been practicing for more than a decade, he said delays have become increasingly common for his clients.
“The first thing I tell people in their first consultation is that the timeline is very unpredictable,” Rochstein said. “Sometimes we can file a case and get it approved in just a few months, and other times it takes us one to two years.”
Rochstein said his office typically reaches out to immigration agencies and congressional offices when cases get stuck, with little success.
“We’re often drafted to contact immigration to ask what’s going on,” he said. “Is there anything we can add or help with the decision? Often these inquiries go nowhere.”
His most recent green card approval came from a case originally filed in March 2024. Another client had a green card interview last January and was still awaiting a decision despite multiple inquiries and attempts to obtain congressional assistance.
The backlog will grow by 2 million cases in 2025, following an increase in new applications and a decline in completions during the first three quarters of Trump’s second administration, the commission’s data shows.
Pending cases for Temporary Protected Status applications increased by about 150%, from 465,118 to nearly 1.2 million. Pending employment authorization requests from green card applicants more than doubled during the same period.
Rejection rates have also increased. The overall USCIS rejection rate will increase from 8.6% in 2016 to 11.1% in 2025.
Jazmin Chavez, an adjunct professor of Chicano studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver, said the delays did not happen in a vacuum. Therefore, people who follow the legal process will be at risk.
“There is a category of people who will now lose their status and that is no accident because they can now be deported, which means we can go after them, which increases the quota that should be met,” Chavez said.
Chavez attributes the crisis to years of underfunding and policy decisions across governments, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing budget and staff cuts.
“This is very much a historically broken system, but there has been no investment in designing a system that actually works for everyday immigrants, families or community members who are applying for these processes,” she said.
The committee’s data shows that USCIS spending under the current administration has been directed primarily toward enforcement rather than processing infrastructure, and the agency remains severely understaffed to handle its large number of pending cases.
