After a declining trend, the National Visa Center (NVC) of the Department of State observed a rise in the number of pending immigrant visa (IV) cases, which went from 384,681 cases in September to 399,286 cases in October, an increase of 3.8%.
The NVC reports that this month alone, there was an increase of more than 18,000 green card applicant cases that were documentarily complete and prepared to be scheduled for interviews, raising the number from 416,856 to 435,063. Although generally the number of documentarily complete (DC) cases has been declining since July 2021, this represents the first time in five months that the number of DC cases has climbed. A case is considered to be documentarily complete when all necessary paperwork has been presented to the NVC, accepted by them, and the case is prepared for scheduling an official interview.
Benefit wait times are increasing significantly as a result of the backlog as well. The median for completed cases is the main emphasis of DHS—wait USCIS’s time statistics, which makes it frequently challenging to interpret. A large number of cases that have been outstanding for a very long time might also be carried over by the agency without having an impact on its performance statistics. However, as of more recent times, DHS and USCIS have begun to post more precise processing data, which displays the vast variation in results even for a single application type in a single year.
