I-131 Median Falls 69 Days, But Backlog and Center Gap Tell a Harder Story

The median for I-131 travel document approvals fell from 285 days (week of July 13) to 217 days (week of July 20), a 24.1% single-week drop. That is a large move in absolute terms. But context tempers the reading: last week's 285-day figure was itself the highest in the 12-week window, and the 12-week trailing average sits at 195 days, so this week represents a rebound from an elevated reading rather than a new low. The 8-week regression carries a slope of +7.1 days per week and an R² of 0.16, indicating a noisy, weakly upward drift with no reliable week-to-week signal. A single week's improvement should not be read as a reversal.

The broader 12-week picture confirms the instability. The median has oscillated between 153 days (week of June 29, n=1,443) and 285 days (week of July 13, n=2,002), a range of 132 days, with no sustained momentum in either direction. This week's 25th percentile (p25) sits at 189 days and the 75th percentile (p75) at 295 days, a 106-day interquartile range (IQR, the spread between the fastest quarter and the slowest quarter of approved cases). That spread reflects genuine variation in how long different cases are waiting, not statistical noise from a thin sample.

The aggregate median this week is, in part, an average of two very different populations. IOE (electronic filers, 1,112 cases) posted a median of 92 days. LIN (Nebraska Service Center, 866 cases) posted a median of 379 days. Together those two centers account for about 96% of this week's approved volume, and their 287-day gap is what fired the uneven_centers anomaly flag at a value of 290.90. The remaining centers are much smaller: WAC (California Service Center, 62 cases) came in at 130 days, and MSC (National Benefits Center, 23 cases) at 346 days. Case mix differs across centers, so this is a structural comparison, not a direct performance ranking.

For applicants, the center routing matters as much as the overall median. An electronically filed case routed to IOE is operating in a fundamentally different queue from a paper-filed case at LIN. LIN's 8-week slope of +0.9 days per week with an R² of 0.11 shows a flat and noisy trend; no near-term improvement is reliably signaled there. IOE's slope of +11.6 days per week with R² of 0.25 suggests its wait is drifting upward, though the fit remains weak. The gap between the two centers is the more durable signal, and it is wider than anything the aggregate median conveys.

The filing-month cohort (a group of cases) data (cases tracked from the month they were filed through today) show a picture that the weekly approval median does not capture. As of the July 27 snapshot, the I-131 active pending backlog stands at 132,412 cases, up 74,053 cases (+126.9%) in 81 days (May 7 to July 27). The April 2026 filing-month group is the single largest contributor, with 41,219 active cases still awaiting a decision out of 44,644 total cases filed that month. Across all recent cohorts, approval rates remain in the low single digits: the March 2026 group (age 21 weeks) stands at 6.7% approved, and the February 2026 group (age 25 weeks) is at 11.4% approved.

The 11.4% approval rate for the February 2026 group at 25 weeks of age is low relative to historical norms for Advance Parole (AP) cases, which have historically cleared in 60 to 120 days. Monthly status counts show approvals staying thin: 117 approvals were recorded in June 2026 and 204 in May 2026, while receipts remained much higher at 8,682 in June and 12,270 in May. The data does not break down by document subtype (Advance Parole vs. Reentry Permit vs. Refugee Travel Document), so the aggregate cohort rates could reflect a heavier mix of slower document types. The data alone does not tell us which subtype is driving the low clearance rates.

The stage-duration data (raw percentiles across the 30-day window) shows where pending cases are spending their time. The largest single group sits at 'Case Was Received and A Receipt Notice Was Sent,' at 29.1% of the active pipeline, representing 134,804 cases out of the roughly 463,000 total cases tracked across all statuses in the 30-day window, with a raw median wait at that stage of 228 days (25th percentile 186 days, 75th percentile 281 days). Another 7.1% of the pipeline, across 33,144 cases, sits at 'Case Was Updated To Show Fingerprints Were Taken,' the biometrics (fingerprint and photo appointment) stage, with a raw median of 349 days, p25 of 266 days, and p75 of 398 days. The biometrics stage carries the longest single-stage median in the table and represents a substantial share of where delays are accumulating for pending cases.