I-360 final-stage wait falls 27 days to a 12-week low, but the pending backlog nearly doubled

The week of June 22 produced the sharpest single-week drop in the I-360 final-stage wait (median days from last reported status to approval) in the current 12-week window. The median fell to 142 days from 169 the prior week, against a trailing 12-week average of 168 days. Every other week in the series sat between 162 and 177 days. The anomaly detector rated this reading at -6.60 σ below the 8-week trend, computed against the prior 4-week trailing mean. One-week outlier-lows at this magnitude are often noise rather than a durable shift; the sample of 727 approved cases is real, but who gets approved in any given week can compress or extend the median substantially.

Breaking the week's approved cases by processing center clarifies where the aggregate median came from. MSC (the National Benefits Center in Lee's Summit, MO) handled 707 of 727 approved cases — nearly the entire week's volume — and posted a median of 146 days, consistent with its 8-week slope of -2.2 days per week. The aggregate's drop to 142 is largely driven by that MSC pool. The Nebraska Service Center (LIN) approved just 20 cases this week at a median of only 8 days. A sample this thin is too small to interpret as a genuine 8-day processing path; the sample-size difference between the two centers (707 cases versus 20 cases) makes direct comparison unreliable. The California Service Center (WAC) approved 23 cases at 136 days, with a reported slope of -137.2 days per week and an R² of 1.00 — both figures are fit artifacts of having just a handful of data points, not evidence of a real trend.

The anomaly detector also fired an rfe_fast flag this week. Cases with an RFE (Request for Evidence) response on file cleared in a median of 21 days, compared with 182 days for plain-processing cases with no RFE history — a ratio of 8.78 to 1. The direction here aligns with what the data brief calls the editorial direction: RFE-stamped cases cleared faster than the non-RFE group this week. The most likely explanation is a batch effect: a set of RFE responses received around the same time reached the adjudication (the USCIS case-decision step) queue simultaneously and cleared together, compressing the RFE-side median. This is not evidence that USCIS adjudicators are reviewing RFE responses more quickly in general. For most applicants, the non-RFE median of 182 days is the more representative anchor for plain cases.

The stage durations data (from the 30-day raw window) offers some context on the populations still in the pipeline. Among all active I-360 cases, 8.6% are sitting at 'Request for Initial Evidence Was Sent', with a median of 49 days at that stage (25th percentile, p25: 32 days; 75th percentile, p75: 76 days) across 4,658 cases. Another 5.7% are at 'Response To USCIS' Request For Evidence Was Received', with a median of 63 days at that stage (p25: 31 days; p75: 99 days) across 3,060 cases. These are the populations that will eventually feed into future RFE-completion metrics. The current 21-day RFE-completion median does not predict how quickly those pending responses will ultimately close.

A batch of RFE responses clearing at once compressed the RFE median to 21 days — that one-week reading is not a new baseline for how fast those cases typically move.