I-821D Final-Stage Wait Collapses to 21 Days as USCIS Clears 5,002 Cases in One Week
The median final-stage wait fell 136 days from its 12-week peak in a pattern consistent with a large-scale batch adjudication event. The next four weeks carry wide uncertainty — the median could hold near current lows or rebound toward the 100-to-150-day range seen earlier this spring.
The I-821D final-stage wait fell to 21 days this week, down from a 12-week peak of 170 days in late May and a 12-week trailing average of 127 days. 5,002 cases were approved in the week of June 8, roughly seven times the typical weekly volume seen earlier in this window. The volume and speed combination is consistent with a bulk clearing event — USCIS processing a large queue of pending cases in a compressed window — though no official announcement explains the shift. Readers with pending cases should not anchor to the current low; if the batch event has concluded, the median may return toward prior-spring levels.
- The I-821D final-stage median fell to 21 days this week, down from a 12-week peak of 170 days in W22 — a drop of 149 days in two weeks.
- 5,002 cases were approved in the week of June 8, nearly three times the prior 12-week high of 1,481 in W23, pointing to a batch adjudication (USCIS's decision step) event rather than gradual improvement.
- RFE (Request for Evidence)-stamped cases cleared in a median of 10 days, versus 89 days for non-RFE cases — an inversion of the normal pattern flagged by the system's anomaly detector.
- Cases still showing 'Case Is Still Being Processed By USCIS' carry a raw median of 242 days across 49,781 active cases, indicating a substantial cohort (a group of cases) of older pending cases not yet reached by this week's clearing.
- The 4-week forecast projects a range of ~10 to 77 days, but the regression R² of 0.51 and a residual standard deviation of 45 days mean the projection carries wide uncertainty in either direction.
21 days: a floor not seen in this data window
The median final-stage wait for I-821D (Consideration of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) peaked at 157 days in W18 (Apr 27), drifted higher to 170 days in W22 (May 25), then fell to 33 days in W23 and 21 days this week. That 149-day two-week drop places this week's reading 106 days below the 12-week trailing average of 127 days. The structural signal is the volume: 5,002 cases were approved this week, compared to a typical range of roughly 300 to 900 cases per week over the prior ten weeks and a prior high of 1,481 in W23. This volume-and-speed combination is consistent with a bulk clearing event — USCIS processing a large accumulated queue in a compressed window — but USCIS has not publicly confirmed any such operation.
All 5,002 approved cases this week routed through IOE, the e-filing channel, which is the only active processing center in this data. A small number of WAC (California Service Center) transitions (7) appear in the activity log but represent a negligible share of volume. USCIS last published an official I-821D processing time on 2026-04-21, citing 120 days for the 149-CAT category. That figure predates the current clearing event by roughly six weeks and is not directly comparable to this week's median, which measures final-stage wait rather than total filing-to-approval time.
Which cases are clearing, and when they were filed
I-821D is overwhelmingly a renewal program. Initial DACA filings have been barred under standing court orders since 2021, so the cases approved this week almost certainly reflect renewal applications. Renewals follow a two-year cycle: recipients must refile before their current grant expires, meaning the filing cohort from mid-2024 would be approaching its adjudication (the USCIS decision step where approval, denial, or a request for more documentation is issued) window now. That two-year cadence may explain why a large number of cases became ready for decision simultaneously, in line with a batch processing interpretation.
The filing-month cohort burndown table shows the December 2025 group (age 28 weeks) at 49.1% cleared across its 53 tracked cases, the highest clearance rate among recent cohorts. The January 2026 group (age 24 weeks) has cleared 16.2% of its 37 tracked cases. Taken together, total tracked cases across all six cohorts add up to 116 cases — a small fraction of the 5,002 approvals recorded this week alone. The approved volume this week almost certainly comes from much older filing cohorts not captured in this six-month window, reinforcing the interpretation that this week's clearing reached deep into a backlog of long-pending cases.
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