The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is placing a strong focus on Rural EB-5 cases and less on processing high-unemployment (HUA) petitions, according to data from a recent FOIA release on EB-5 petition processingbetween April 2022 and July 2025.
The information was released at the request of the American Immigrant Investor Alliance, which requested details on I-526 and I-526E receipts, approvals, and denials by country, TEA category, and filing date. The case was litigated by attorney Alexandra George of the Galati Law Firm.
“The recently released FOIA data continues to confirm what EB-5 practitioners have been seeing on the ground for some time,” says Dennis Tristani from Tristani Law.
What does the recent EB-5 data say?
During the reported three years and three months, USCIS processed 13,520 petitions. A significant majority (81%) of adjudicated cases were Rural, while only 9% of HUA petitions were processed.
For AIIA, the recent data is especially important because it shows, for the first time, how USCIS processed the I-526E inventory in 2025
The statistics showing Rural processing priority “is good news for petition processing times, and also means that Rural retrogression has a chance to come sooner,” the association says. However, it deems the inattention to High Unemployment casesas concerning.
“These numbers are unacceptably low for HUA – not even enough to create enough qualified applicants to use the quota of HUA visas. USCIS must pick up the pace of HUA approvals in the future, to avoid continuing wastage of HUA visas,” according to AIIA.
EB-5 attorneys react to FOIA release
Tristani cautions about the limits of the information itself.
“The FOIA production cuts off in June 2025, and adjudication trends shifted noticeably in the second half of the year. Since that point, USCIS has issued a significant increase in RFEs, NOIDs, and denials – particularly in cases involving regional center loan models, partial funding structures, and documentation purporting to show that the investor was ‘in the process of investing.’”
Joey Barnett from WR Immigration notes that the information shows there are not enough visa appointments for reserved visas scheduled abroad and that USCIS is not processing adjustment of status applications quickly.
Barnett also warns that processing delays will push Final Action Dates for EB-5 applications out in the short term and will likely cause larger visa queue logjams in the future.
“The government needs to get its act together and prioritize reserved visa use in the next couple of months, or we will again see more wasted reserved visa numbers.”
The data also confirmed that China and India remain primary sources of EB-5 investor petitions and that there is no imminent risk of a backlog affecting the set-aside categories in 2026.
“The overall approval volume reflected in the data remains too low to suggest that meaningful visa backlogs will materialize in the current fiscal year, particularly outside the rural category,” Tristani adds.
As a result, denial rates for I-526E petitions may ultimately prove higher for the latter half of calendar year 2025 than the FOIA data currently reflects. If that trend holds, it could have downstream effects on actual visa usage and the timing of priority-date implementation.
Previous FOIA releases show demand for HUA has changedover time
In May last year, AIIA also released detailed statistics on the number of I-526/I-526E petitions filed between April 2022 and January 2025, as well as approvals and denials by country (China, India, and Rest of World) and TEA category.
Key takeaways from this information include that adjudication also differs significantly between rural and HUA categories. It showed that overall adjudication percentages for rural petitions were much higher than those for HUA petitions across all countries listed.
Two years ago, the scene was different. Data released through FOIA on EB-5 Form I-526E petitions that USCIS received during fiscal year 2022 and April 18, 2024, showed HUA surpassing that for Rural, with Chinese investors leading applications.
This trend of HUAS overpassing rural areas was also ratified in another FOIA release comprising EB-5 demand in 2023.
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