I-360 Final-Stage Waits Rebound to 172 Days as an Unusual RFE Pattern Emerges

The I-360 final-stage wait this week came in at 172 days, up 4 days from last week's 169 and right back to the level the series opened on in mid-February (the week of Feb 16 also printed 172 days). In between, the median traced a round-trip: it fell to a 12-week low of 162 days in the week of Apr 6, then reversed course. The 12-week trailing average sits at 169 days, so this week's reading is 3 days above that baseline. The sample of 714 approved cases is below recent weekly volumes, which have ranged from about 819 to 993 cases over the prior 12 weeks, so some week-level noise is possible.

The 8-week slope of +1.1 days per week, with an R² of 0.54, places this trend in a moderate-fit category: the direction is plausible but the week-to-week scatter is real. The 25th percentile (p25) this week sits at 167 days and the 75th percentile (p75) at 175 days, a spread of just 8 days that reflects week-to-week stability in the percentile readings rather than a tight distribution of individual case waits. This metric measures the final-stage wait from last reported status to approval, not total filing-to-approval time, which is substantially longer for most applicants.

The National Benefits Center (MSC, USCIS's Lee's Summit, MO facility) processed all 714 approved cases this week, posting a median of 172 days and a slope of +1.0 days per week (R² = 0.51). Two other centers appear in the data: the California Service Center (WAC) shows 137 days on 12 cases, and the Nebraska Service Center (LIN) shows 7 days on 11 cases. Both are well below the 200-case threshold at which weekly readings become reliably interpretable; the case-mix differs across centers and the samples are not directly comparable to MSC's volume. The 7-day LIN reading almost certainly reflects a specific routing or status artifact rather than genuinely fast adjudication (adjudication is the USCIS decision step where approval, denial, or a request for more information is issued).

WAC's 8-week slope of +18.0 days per week with an R² of 1.00 looks precise but is not meaningful: a perfect linear fit on 12 cases means the trend line is driven by a very small number of approvals, not by a real signal about the center's pace. Attorney readers should not use that slope to advise clients on WAC routing expectations.

An RFE (Request for Evidence) is USCIS's standard follow-up letter asking for additional documentation; receiving one does not by itself signal denial, and most cases that receive an RFE are ultimately approved. This week, cases where applicants had responded to an RFE cleared in a median of 15 days, while cases with no RFE took 182 days. That 12x gap, a ratio of 12.42 to 1, triggered the rfe_fast anomaly flag. The flag means the RFE-stamped cases that were approved this week happened to clear unusually quickly after their response was received, not that RFE cases overall are running faster.

A plausible mechanism is a batch effect: a group of RFE responses filed around the same period may have cleared together, compressing the approved-RFE median for this particular week. Cases that received shorter, easily-resolved evidence requests could also resolve faster than the larger non-RFE group, which has generally been sitting longer in the queue. The data does not tell us which explanation applies. What the stage table does tell us is that cases currently waiting at the 'Response To USCIS Request For Evidence Was Received' status show a median of 76 days at that stage across 1,957 pending cases (with a 25th percentile of 33 days and a 75th percentile of 115 days); the 15-day approved figure this week reflects cases that moved through review far faster than that typical pending experience.

A flag on the fast side is still an anomaly: it means something unusual happened in the RFE pipeline this week, not that two-week RFE clearance is now the norm.