The U.S. immigration system is frequently described as broken, a sentiment echoed in numerous debates surrounding its current state. A new interactive dashboard launched by the American Immigration Council aims to shed light on this complexity, providing an accessible resource for anyone interested in the intricacies of the U.S. legal immigration system.
This dashboard is the most extensive public collection of data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), featuring over 20,000 data points across more than 190 types of immigration applications and petitions from fiscal year 2016 to fiscal year 2025. Users can analyze trends in applications, processing times, backlogs, and denial rates over the years while comparing various categories.
As immigration policy remains a focal point in national discourse, the dashboard underscores a crucial reality: USCIS has struggled to effectively manage the increasingly high volume of applications and petitions. The agency’s performance has deteriorated over time, exacerbated by policy shifts between administrations and the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Escalating Backlogs in Immigration Applications
Analysis from the council reveals that the USCIS backlog has soared more than threefold over the past decade, escalating from 3.5 million cases in the first quarter of fiscal year 2016 to 11.6 million cases by the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2025.
The dashboard further illustrates that the rate of case completions began to trail behind new filings in 2020 and 2021. Processing delays, largely due to the pandemic and policy changes introduced during the initial Trump administration, severely hampered the agency’s efficiency. Consequently, USCIS found itself ill-equipped to manage the surge in new submissions in 2021.
Between June 2020 and September 2021 alone, the backlog expanded by 2.3 million cases. During the second quarter of 2021, the efficiency ratio—a measure of completed cases versus new filings—plummeted to an unprecedented low of 0.66. In that period, USCIS garnered 2.6 million applications but only processed 1.7 million, adding 866,910 cases to the backlog in just three months.
By the end of the Biden administration in 2024, projections indicated it would take approximately 9.4 months to clear the existing backlog based on processing capacity from October to December. The surge in new applications and petitions at the start of 2025 contributed to an additional 2 million cases in the backlog during that year, with estimations suggesting a clearance time of 13.8 months at the capacity from July to September of that year.
Escalating Denial Rates Across Application Types
The overall denial rate at USCIS has escalated, climbing from 8.6% in the first quarter of fiscal year 2016 to a high of 14.9% by the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2022. By the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2025, it settled at a still high 11.1%.
Data indicates that rejection rates for major application types have continued to rise from Q1 2025 to Q4 2025. For instance, the denial rate for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) applications surged from 2.9% to 12.8%. Similarly, the rejection rate for Employment Authorization Document (EAD) applications submitted by individuals with pending green card applications more than doubled, increasing from 5.1% to 13.6%. Notably, the denial rate for exemption applications also saw a sharp increase, moving from approximately 1 in 5 applications to 1 in 3.
These rising rejection rates can often be traced back to policy shifts. Following the enforcement of the “Buy American, Hire American” executive order in April 2017, USCIS heightened scrutiny of applications, expanded requests for evidence (RFEs), and narrowed its interpretation of eligible professions.
Leveraging Data for Insights into Immigration Policy
The data presented in the dashboard reflects USCIS’s struggle to keep pace with the influx of applications and petitions. With a historically high backlog, USCIS officers find themselves dedicating more time to managing cases rather than resolving them. This situation results in prolonged processing times and greater uncertainty for applicants, petitioners, and beneficiaries.
By consolidating nearly a decade’s worth of USCIS data into a single interactive platform, the Council’s dashboard aims to enhance understanding of the current landscape of the U.S. legal immigration system. Policymakers, journalists, advocates, and the public can utilize this database to gain insights into the challenges USCIS faces under current demands and examine how inefficiencies can become a product of deliberate policy choices aimed at reducing immigration numbers.
