USCIS Releases Processing Times for Naturalization Applications Filed During Summer 2007
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has released the projected times for local offices to complete processing of citizenship applications filed during the summer of 2007. Projected processing times at the end of September 2008 range from a high of 14.7 months for Washington, D.C., to a low of 5 months for Helena, Montana.
Last July, USCIS received 460,000 applications for naturalization, which was three times the record for any previous month. For the year, USCIS received 1.4 million naturalization applications, almost double the normal annual volume.
USCIS said it is hiring and training hundreds of additional immigration officers to adjudicate these cases. The agency is also conducting naturalization interviews on weekends, after normal business hours, and in additional locations.
The processing times, USCIS said, “provide a sense of how quickly a case may be processed if there are no complicating factors,” noting that some cases will take longer to complete; for example, if an applicant has been asked to submit additional information or fails the naturalization test, or if the FBI namecheck is in progress.
