DENVER — The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services backlog has more than tripled from 3.5 million pending cases in 2016 to 11.6 million in 2025, according to an interactive dashboard released by the American Immigration Council compiling USCIS data. At current processing rates, it would take 13.8 months to clear the existing backlog without any new cases being filed.

Green card applicants, temporary protected status holders, and immigrant workers face unpredictable wait times as a result. Applications for Temporary Protected Status saw pending cases increase by roughly 150%, from 465,118 to nearly 1.2 million, according to the American Immigration Council. Pending employment authorization requests for individuals with green card applications more than doubled from 2016 to 2025.

Overall USCIS denial rates rose from 8.6% in 2016 to 11.1% by 2025. Council data indicates that USCIS is understaffed to address the volume of pending cases, and that agency spending under the current administration has been directed largely toward enforcement rather than processing infrastructure.

Ian Rochstein, an immigration attorney who has practiced in the field for more than a decade, said delays have become more common for his clients. "One of the first things I tell people at their first consultation is that the timelines are very unpredictable. Sometimes we can get a case submitted, approved within just a few months, and other times we're looking at one to two years," Rochstein said.

His office routinely drafts inquiries to immigration agencies and congressional offices to ask about stalled cases, but those inquiries usually receive no response. One of his most recent green card approvals came for a case originally filed in March 2024.

Jazmin Chavez, an adjunct professor of Chicano Studies at Metropolitan State University Denver, said the backlog stems from years of underfunding and policy decisions across administrations, the COVID-19 pandemic, and ongoing budget and staffing cuts. The council's dashboard draws on USCIS data spanning from 2016 through 2025 to document how pending caseloads have grown across application categories over that period.