January 2025 I-130 Filers

[Miller Family 332]

I filed December 5th at the Nebraska service center.  Hopping in this thread and wishing everyone the best of luck. 

[JustBelieve 7]

On 10/11/2025 at 5:17 PM, S2N said:

They’ve slowed down a bit with the shutdown (they’re still processing, but went from ~4500/day to ~3500/day)

 

January was tracking to have first approvals around the end of December. Now it’d probably see first approvals around end of January/beginning of February as a best guess.

That's just not true... shutdown has nothing to do with I-130 processing. USCIS is a fee funded agency, that already been confirmed. Having said that, as things stand most Jan 2025 PDs will see their approvals in January. They went from 16 months to 13.5 months of waiting, and it keeps going down.

[appleblossom 5,164]

3 hours ago, JustBelieve said:

That's just not true... shutdown has nothing to do with I-130 processing. USCIS is a fee funded agency, that already been confirmed. Having said that, as things stand most Jan 2025 PDs will see their approvals in January. They went from 16 months to 13.5 months of waiting, and it keeps going down.

3.75% of USCIS workers furloughed (https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/2025_0930_dhs_procedures_related_to_a_lapse_in_appropriations.pdf).

 

So a limited impact but still could affect processing times to a minor extent. 

[S2N 545]

34 minutes ago, appleblossom said:

3.75% of USCIS workers furloughed (https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/2025_0930_dhs_procedures_related_to_a_lapse_in_appropriations.pdf).

 

So a limited impact but still could affect processing times to a minor extent. 

And sometimes they need something from someone in another government agency that has been furloughed. Fee funded means you can work on your work if you have what you need, not that you can work on things that others who aren’t working need to give you. It’s becoming a big limitation even in agencies that haven’t furloughed anyone at this point.

 

4 hours ago, JustBelieve said:

That's just not true... shutdown has nothing to do with I-130 processing. USCIS is a fee funded agency, that already been confirmed. Having said that, as things stand most Jan 2025 PDs will see their approvals in January. They went from 16 months to 13.5 months of waiting, and it keeps going down.

USCIS received $6.4 billion in FY2024 appropriations according to DHS’ financials (p. 230.) Most of that likely doesn’t fund staff salaries and relates to contractor funding, but all that still has an impact. ISOs are working but if some contractors and support staff aren’t they’ll face limitations.

 

Also the data is public. One of the paid websites is showing a decline in processing speed of 900 cases a day for I-130s in October (I don’t pay and can’t link here because they sell services, but they have a great free page that slices and dices the API data.) The obvious answer is the shutdown has had some impact, but even if that’s not the case the data is clear that October has been slower. Still faster than January and 2024, but slower than the rest of 2025.

Edited yesterday at 12:05 PM by S2N