Rural and High Unemployment processing through July 2025

I’m happy to report new USCIS data obtained via Freedom of Information Act by the investor association AIIA (with litigation by Galati Law). See AIIA’s new post AIIA FOIA Series: Updated I-526E Inventory Statistics for July 2025 for the data plus detailed analysis. The FOIA covers I-526/I-526E receipts, approvals, and denials by TEA category, petitioner country, and filing date from April 1, 2022 to July 31, 2025.

The TEA-specific I-526/I-526E approval and denial data through July 2025 is new and particularly interesting to me. I approach the data with two questions at top of mind. Have there been enough total approvals to create qualified applicants for available set-aside visas? (The timing of Visa Bulletin retrogression depends on this.) What does the distribution of approvals by TEA, country, and priority date tell us about how USCIS is choosing to process I-526 and I-526E petitions? (I-526/I-526E processing times depend on this.)

I’ve made three tables below that highlight lessons I take from the AIIA July 2025 data. The first table puts investor petition data in context of visa availability. It highlights the irony of Rural and High Unemployment: that HUA has the greater long-term backlog risk due to high number of investor filings, but lower near-term retrogression risk due to low number of petition approvals.The second and third tables highlight apparent differences in I-526/I-526E processing by TEA and country, and the extent to which the process isn’t FIFO.

I can’t make conclusions for all time based on data through July 2025. (I hope that processing volumes have increased and processing order has become more equitable since then!) But the FOIA data gives a very interesting look at what happened with set-aside investor demand and petition processing through the middle of last year. Once again, Infrastructure was a data blank in the USCIS report as of July 2025. (I guess this reflects a coding problem in the USCIS database, since I’ve heard of a few Infrastructure projects recruiting investors before July 2025. But Infrastructure numbers may indeed have been at least very low last year.) Meanwhile I continue to hit “refresh” daily on the USCIS data page, hoping for another quarterly report, and will support AIIA to pursue another FOIA request/litigation for the next six months of TEA-specific data.