A 260-Day Center Split Hides What the I-539 Aggregate Cannot Show

The overall I-539 median for Week 26 landed at 115 days, down 22 days from last week's 137. That drop looks reassuring on its own. The driver, however, is SRC: the Texas Service Center issued 1,902 approvals this week (about 60% of all I-539 approvals) at a median of just 22 days, pulling the aggregate toward the low end. WAC, the California Service Center, issued 830 approvals at a median of 282 days, a number moving in the opposite direction. The `uneven_centers` anomaly flag fired at a value of 199.94, reflecting the raw spread between the highest and lowest center medians. For an applicant whose case sits at WAC, the 115-day headline offers little guidance.

The 12-week picture for I-539 is not a clean trend. The median began at 66 days in W15 (Apr 6), moved through 76 days, 99 days, and then climbed past 100 days for most of May and early June, reaching 168 days in W24 (Jun 8) before pulling back to 137 days last week and 115 days this week. The 8-week regression slope is +4.8 days per week, but the R² of 0.26 indicates that the slope explains only a small fraction of the week-to-week variation. The `noisy_stable` label is apt: the median is neither accelerating cleanly nor falling cleanly, and a single week's drop should not be read as a sustained reversal.

The spread within this week's approvals also reflects the center divergence. The 25th percentile (p25) sits at 94 days and the 75th percentile (p75) at 154 days, a 60-day interquartile range. Cases at the slower end of the distribution are waiting meaningfully longer than those at the faster end, and center routing appears to be a contributing factor to that spread, given SRC's 22-day median and WAC's 282-day median pulling in opposite directions.

WAC's 8-week slope of +21.2 days per week, backed by an R² of 0.81, means that over the past eight weeks WAC's median final-stage wait has added roughly 170 days in total. That is a strong, statistically confident directional signal: approvals from WAC are taking longer. The contrast with other non-SRC centers is instructive. The Vermont Service Center (EAC) carries a slope of +2.2 days per week with an R² of 0.30, and the Nebraska Service Center (LIN) shows a slope of +5.0 days per week with an R² of 0.38. Both are drifting upward, but neither approaches WAC's pace or confidence level. WAC is the outlier, not a representative signal for non-SRC processing overall. EAC's median of 232 days sits 50 days below WAC's, showing that the problem is center-specific.