Preliminary read: A 289-day center gap overshadows I-131's modest weekly rise
Week 18, 2026 carries an early signal only, with 966 approved cases roughly half the typical weekly volume. The story this week is routing: where a case lands determines its wait far more than any system-wide trend.
This week's I-131 final-stage wait came in at a preliminary 229 days, up 8 days from last week's 221, based on a sample of 966 approved cases, about half the prior 12-week pace. The headline movement is modest. What is not modest is the gap between processing centers: e-filed cases at IOE (the electronic-filing routing center) cleared in a median of 104 days, while cases at LIN (Nebraska Service Center) took 393 days, reflecting a 289-day spread that dwarfs the week-over-week change. The 12-week trailing average sits at 175 days, placing this week's read 54 days above that baseline. All figures should be treated as tentative until the sample matures.
- The preliminary median of 229 days this week is 54 days above the 12-week trailing average of 175 days, though the sample of 966 cases is roughly half the typical weekly volume.
- LIN (Nebraska Service Center) cases waited a median of 393 days vs. 104 days for e-filed IOE cases, a 289-day gap that triggered the uneven-centers anomaly flag at a spread value of 321.
- RFE (Request for Evidence)-stamped cases cleared in just 13 days vs. 186 days for non-RFE cases this week, an inversion the rfe_fast anomaly flag captured; the most likely explanation is a batch of long-pending RFE responses reaching adjudication (USCIS's decision step) together.
- The January 2026 filing-month group is only 6.5% approved at 18 weeks old, and the total active pending backlog reached 104,205 cases, up 7,848 in six days.
- WAC (California Service Center) is the only center with a statistically reliable downward slope (-8.0 days per week, R² = 0.84 over the last 8 weeks), though it accounts for just 158 of this week's 966 approved cases.
An early read on a week of contrasts
At a preliminary sample of 966 cases this week, the I-131 final-stage wait median came in at 229 days, up 8 days from last week's 221. The 12-week trailing average is 175 days, so this week's reading sits 54 days above the recent norm. Because the sample is roughly half the prior 12-week median volume, all findings here should be treated as tentative: the number can shift as additional approvals are recorded.
The 8-week regression slope of -8.5 days per week sounds like a downward trend, but the R² of 0.15 means the regression line explains almost none of the week-to-week variation. Over the past 12 weeks, the median has swung between 53 days and 269 days. The slope alone should not be read as a reliable signal that wait times are steadily falling.
Swings of 200 days in eight weeks
The Feb 9 week posted a median of 53 days; by Feb 23 the median had jumped to 230 days; it peaked at 269 days in mid-March before falling back to 137 days by early April, then rebounded to 221 days last week and 229 days this week. I-131 covers Advance Parole (AP), Reentry Permits, and Refugee Travel Documents, document types that process at very different speeds. Weekly aggregate medians shift substantially when a given week's approvals skew toward one type. The volatility in the series appears to follow shifts in document-type mix rather than random administrative behavior, though the data does not distinguish types directly.
A 289-day gulf between centers
IOE, which handles e-filed cases, posted a median of 104 days across 430 approved cases this week. LIN (Nebraska Service Center) posted 393 days across 378 cases, with a slope of -0.6 days per week and an R² of 0.01, meaning no reliable directional trend. WAC (California Service Center) sits at 176 days across 158 cases and carries the only statistically reliable signal in the data: a slope of -8.0 days per week with an R² of 0.84 over the last 8 weeks. MSC (National Benefits Center) shows 253 days, but with only 32 approved cases, that reading is too thin to interpret with confidence. The uneven-centers anomaly flag fired at a spread value of 321, well above the 12-day threshold. The LIN-vs-IOE gap is consistent with document-type routing: e-filed Advance Parole applications concentrate at IOE while paper-based Reentry Permits route predominantly through LIN and NSC. The case mix differs across centers, so these are not direct apples-to-apples throughput comparisons.
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