A 5-Day I-821 Median Masks a TPS Termination Wave, Not Faster Approvals

The I-821 final-stage wait this week is 5 days, down from 50 days last week. That number would ordinarily signal a processing improvement. It does not here. Across all IOE cases in the last 30 days, the dominant status transition is "terminated," recorded for approximately 9,165 cases. The 5-day reading captures how quickly a termination notice closes a case after its last status update, not how fast USCIS is adjudicating (approving or denying) individual applications. Genuine approvals are vanishingly rare in the current data.

What 'terminated' means for your I-821 case

When a country's TPS designation ends by Federal Register notice (FRN), pending applications tied to that designation are closed. The stage duration data shows a "TPS Country Designation Terminated by FRN" category with a median of 124 days at that status across 981 cases (25th percentile 87 days, 75th percentile 141 days). A termination does not reflect on any individual applicant's documents or eligibility; it reflects a country-level policy decision. This brief does not track country-specific designation status. For current information on which countries' TPS designations remain active, readers should consult USCIS news releases directly.

The 12-week trend table tells the story of the termination wave in compressed form. From the week of May 4 (W19) through the week of June 8 (W24), weekly medians held between 382 and 444 days, reflecting a processing queue dominated by long-pending genuine applications. Then in the week of June 15 (W25), the median fell to 50 days, and by June 22 (W26) it had dropped to 2 days, where it has largely stayed. That collapse was not a processing acceleration. It coincides with the termination activity visible in the monthly counts: 1,705 terminations in June 2025, 1,512 in July, 726 in August, and 5,792 in September, before the volume tapered. The 8-week regression slope of -59.3 days per week (R² = 0.58) registers as an improvement, but it is a statistical artifact of the shift from long-wait approvals to near-instant termination closures.

This week's sample of 146 approved cases is just below the 200-case threshold at which weekly medians become more reliable. The same-week comparison from last year carries a sample of only 10 cases, too small to support a meaningful year-over-year comparison. Both caveats argue against reading the current low median as a durable trend.

The filing-month cohort burndown data (cases grouped by the month they were filed) makes the stagnation concrete for 2026 applicants. The May 2026 filing cohort, now 12 weeks old, has a 0.0% approval rate across 53 total cases. The February 2026 cohort, 25 weeks old, has reached only 2.5% approved across 81 cases. Even the oldest 2026 cohort in the data, January 2026 (tracking separately in the monthly counts), shows only a handful of approvals. In a healthy processing environment, cohorts at 12 to 25 weeks would typically show meaningfully higher clearance rates. The active pending backlog of I-821 cases grew from roughly 151 to 320 cases between May 7 and July 27, 2026, a 111.9% increase over 81 days, driven almost entirely by the May 2026 cohort adding 52 active cases.

A reader in the May 2026 cohort who sees "5 days" as this week's median might assume approvals are moving quickly. The cases registering that 5-day final-stage wait are termination closures, not approvals of pending applications like theirs. Their own application sits in an active queue with essentially no approvals issued yet for the 2026 filing months.