I-821 Final-Stage Wait Jumps 44 Days in One Week, Anomaly Flag Fires

The median final-stage wait for I-821 (Application for Temporary Protected Status) approvals reached 212 days the week of September 21, up from 168 days the prior week, a 44-day rise on a sample of 82 approved cases. A statistical outlier flag fired at z = 2.39 against the prior 8-week trailing window, placing this week's reading well above the recent trend line. The 12-week trailing average for this form is 77 days, so the 212-day reading arrives roughly 135 days above that recent norm. At 82 cases, the sample is below the 200-case threshold where weekly variance shrinks meaningfully, so some portion of this week's departure from the norm may reflect who happened to be approved rather than a settled shift in the adjudication (USCIS's case decision step) queue.

Compared with the same week last year, the 212-day reading is actually 5 days below: the same ISO week in 2025 produced a 217-day median on 357 cases, and the 3-year same-week average is also 217 days. The year-over-year delta is just -2.2%, meaning the absolute level is not far from historical seasonal norms for late September. The relevant concern is the trajectory, not the absolute level: the 8-week slope of +15.4 days per week means the form has been accelerating consistently since midsummer, and this week's reading sits atop that climb rather than correcting it.

The recent-activity table shows 7,013 IOE transitions in the past 30 days whose dominant status is 'terminated,' with 6,755 of those concentrated at the IOE09 processing node. The stage-duration data shows 978 cases at 'TPS Country Designation Terminated By FRN' with a median of 104 days, a 25th percentile (p25) of 64 days, and a 75th percentile (p75) of 167 days across that group; another 28 cases carry a variant spelling of the same status. When DHS terminates a country's TPS designation via Federal Register Notice (FRN), pending cases receive a termination status rather than an approval or denial. These cases do not appear in the approved-cases metric, so the 82-case approval sample this week represents only the subset that resolved via adjudication, not the full population of cases that reached some final status.

The status-count-by-filing-month table sharpens the picture. Among cases filed in September 2025, 5,871 of 6,084 total tracked cases currently carry a terminated status, a share of roughly 96%. The August 2025 filing month shows 825 terminated out of 1,023 total, about 81%. By contrast, filing months from April 2026 through August 2026 each show terminated counts in the single digits. This pattern appears consistent with a termination event that swept through cases filed in the summer-to-fall 2025 window. The data brief does not identify which country designation produced these terminations, and the news context does not confirm a specific country; the mechanism may reflect a single large designation termination or multiple overlapping ones.

The filing-month cohort (a group of cases) burndown table, which tracks groups of cases filed in the same month, shows that no cases filed in August or September 2026 have been approved yet. The July 2026 filing group (12 weeks old) has 1 approval out of 64 filed cases, a rate of 1.6%. The most mature cohort shown, April 2026 (25 weeks old), stands at 9.5% approved: 7 approvals out of 74 cases. These figures cover only the six most recent filing months. The full pending backlog of 119,159 active cases (across all filing months combined) is a separate and much larger population.

USCIS's official processing-time page, last updated September 17, 2026, lists the initial TPS filing category 821SD_I at 210 days and re-registration categories ranging from 510 to 750 days. Those figures are 80th-percentile estimates, meaning they represent the wait time that 80% of cases fall under, and are not directly comparable to this brief's medians. The USCIS figures do confirm that the agency itself projects long waits for both initial and re-registration paths, particularly for specific country-and-filing-type combinations.

The total active backlog stood at 119,159 cases as of the September 28 snapshot, down 532 from 28 days earlier, a reduction of 0.4% over that period. At that pace of net reduction, the pending queue would shrink very slowly even if no new cases arrived, and new filings continue to enter the pipeline each month. This is context for understanding what 9.5% approved at 25 weeks means: the broader queue is large and moving slowly.