USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services): Definition & Immigration Context, VisaTracker

What It Means

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was created on March 1, 2003, when the Homeland Security Act of 2002 dissolved the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and divided its functions among three new DHS components: USCIS (benefits), ICE (interior enforcement), and CBP (border enforcement). USCIS operates through a network of roughly 88 domestic field offices, 5 service centers (California, Nebraska, Texas, Vermont, and Potomac), 2 National Benefits Centers, and 16 international field offices, along with the Asylum Division's 8 regional offices. The agency is unusual among federal agencies in that roughly 96% of its budget comes from application and petition filing fees rather than congressional appropriations, per INA section 286(m). Annual workload includes over 8 million applications and petitions across more than 90 form types, including I-485 adjustment applications (about 1.1 million filed per year), N-400 naturalization applications (about 800,000 to 1 million), I-765 work authorization (over 2 million), I-130 family petitions, I-140 employment petitions, I-589 asylum applications, I-821D DACA requests, and hundreds of other forms. USCIS publishes quarterly processing time data for every form at every adjudicating office, which powers visatracker.org's Pipeline Score. The agency's leadership is a Senate-confirmed Director, with policy set through the Policy Manual (the authoritative successor to the older Adjudicators Field Manual) and precedent decisions from the Administrative Appeals Office (AAO).