U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services USCIS

For most of the twentieth century a single agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, both enforced immigration law and granted immigration benefits, a pairing critics said left it doing neither well. The Homeland Security Act split those roles. On March 1, 2003, the benefits side became U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, first called the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, responsible for deciding who may live, work, and become a citizen in the United States through the legal immigration system.

USCIS adjudicates more than ten million applications and petitions a year. It decides petitions from employers and families that sponsor immigrants, including the I-130 for relatives and the I-140 for workers, among them the extraordinary ability and national interest categories. It approves petitions for temporary workers such as H-1B and O-1 visa holders, although the visa itself is issued abroad by the State Department. It processes applications to adjust status to permanent residence, grants green cards, decides affirmative asylum claims and refugee cases overseas, issues employment authorization, administers Temporary Protected Status and DACA, and naturalizes roughly 800,000 new citizens a year after the English and civics tests.

The agency employs about 20,000 people at its Camp Springs, Maryland, headquarters, four service centers, and more than eighty field offices, and it runs E-Verify, the system employers use to confirm work eligibility. Unusually, about 96 percent of its roughly 6 billion dollar budget comes from filing fees rather than appropriations, which means fee levels, set by regulation, determine its capacity, and a drop in applications can produce a budget crisis, as it did in 2020. Backlogs have run into the millions of pending cases, with some green card categories waiting years because of annual per-country limits set by Congress.

USCIS policy shifts with each administration through changes in fees, vetting, evidentiary standards, and which applications it prioritizes. In 2025 the agency expanded screening of applicants, including review of social media, paused or tightened adjudication of some categories, raised fees under the budget law, and began administering a new 100,000 dollar payment required by presidential proclamation on many new H-1B petitions, which drew legal challenges. Supporters described the changes as restoring rigor and protecting American workers. Employers, universities, and immigration lawyers described growing delays and uncertainty in the legal system the agency exists to run.