What's the wait time nowadays?

[Adam&Allison 128]

I know that this is hugely dependent on field office, but it just seems to me that 12 months ago you could reasonably expect to wait 6-8 months for AOS, maybe there was a couple of field offices that were busier but that seemed roughly around the average - now it just seems to be taking so much longer. We've been waiting 9 and a half months going through Philadelphia and because of the new processing times on the website USCIS won't tell you anything until you get past 20 months which is what they deem normal processing times, so even talking to them seems a bit pointless because until you get past that second date range they've posted, your still deemed as within normal processing times.

 

Why the sudden spike in things taking a lot longer? I've seen periods before where USCIS speeds up and slows down, but usually it's a gradual thing - this sudden spike in waiting times seems real sudden. 

[Mmagic 127]

I think the same story is happening in most states and cities. I am in Los Angeles and my AOS petition is coming to 11 months soon. It seems that no one at USCIS is giving a straight answer to why all the delays. Since Trump took office, things are no longer the same with USCIS. Why and how I don't know...We just wait and see. You can make an Infopass appointment to visit USCIS office, but I doubt they will give an answer to the timeline. 

[Adam&Allison 128]

1 minute ago, Mmagic said:

I think the same story is happening in most states and cities. I am in Los Angeles and my AOS petition is coming to 11 months soon. It seems that no one at USCIS is giving a straight answer to why all the delays. Since Trump took office, things are no longer the same with USCIS. Why and how I don't know...We just wait and see. You can make an Infopass appointment to visit USCIS office, but I doubt they will give an answer to the timeline. 

 

I think the most annoying thing for me is the lack of transparency. I just had to send off my EAD renewal on Monday, so it's been on my mind a bit more than normal. 

 

The only reason I can think of is USCIS saying now everyone applying for a GC through employment based visas must have an interview, whereas previously some of them were waived, could be slowing it down...but surely it can't be slowing it down that much because according to the timelines the longest an employment based AOS is taking is 11 months through Philly, whereas family is 20 months. 

 

[Reggie B 11]

I applied for my AOS mid February. We just received our interview date today for the 21st May. Our local office is Chicago. I'm currently looking for how long it takes after the interview to actually get a GC but this is a lot quicker than I had expected. I haven't even received my EAD or AP yet..

[RaptureSongbird 533]

We are almost exactly in the same boat as @Reggie B.  We submitted on February 6th with Chicago as our local office and have our interview set for May 14.  I don't really understand how this happened so quickly for us.  I've seen others with Chicago as their local office who submitted months before us and are still waiting on an interview letter.  I'm sure there is something in the way that USCIS processes cases, along with background checks and other policies, that makes sense from their side of the desk but from the outside looking in and trying to understand, it can be a bit confusing.

[Hakkenouw 19]

So this might shine a little bit of light on the case, I recently met with a USCIS field officer and an Immigration lawyer, granted this is just the view of two individuals and not a scientific study so don't just take this for the truth.

 

The USCIS field officer said that when the hurricanes hit last September, the US send employees of USCIS out to help the States that were hit by these disasters. This obviously delayed all the visa processes, on top of that, it is generally believed that the immigration processes have become a lot less lenient during Trump's office.

 

 

The Immigration lawyer furthermore told me that processing both a green card and a work permit for every immigrant creates twice the workload for USCIS, they, therefore, came up with the genius solution of processing recent AOS applicants, rather than processing the oldest AOS applicant, so they can skip the work permit all together... How this is fair or how many months this will add to the older AOS applications I wouldn't know.

[chrismar 2]

I wanted to share my timeline so far here as well.

 

Our case was received on February 1st and we are scheduled for the last week of May (2018). Our local office is "Washington, DC" - aka Fairfax, VA.

We were incredibly surprised to see things turned around so soon. At this rate, we'll receive permanent residence status before both AP and EAD. I was expecting to see something around the October/November timeframe.

[CarolineK2017 1]

Wow! I'm extremely jealous that some of you have not been waiting very long. My husband and I started this with a lawyer a little over 2 years ago. The lawyer was filing out the wrong paperwork for the first 9 months. I don't even remember when we actually got everything mailed off, but I'd say its close to 1 1/2 years. We had some delay with assets, but we now have our interview scheduled in a couple of weeks.

 

My husband talked to one USCIS representative on the phone and he told him that he was going to help expedite the process because it should not have taken this long. Then when my husband called back, the person said that he should not have expedited it because we were still in the time frame.