When “Premium” Becomes Mandatory: USCIS Is Failing O and P Visa Petitioners
For more than 16 years, I have represented professional athletes, artists, entertainers and other extraordinary individuals seeking O and P visas to work in the United States. Until recently, a properly prepared O or P petition filed through regular processing would typically be decided within two to three months.
Today, I am seeing regular cases take upward of 15 months.
That is not a minor slowdown. It is a fivefold increase that has made regular processing functionally useless for many O and P petitioners.
These visa categories are inherently time sensitive. Athletes compete according to fixed seasons and event schedules. Artists and entertainers have tours, productions, shoots and performances. Their contracts have start dates. Their careers cannot be placed on hold indefinitely while USCIS works through an unexplained backlog.
Making matters worse, O and P petitions generally cannot be filed more than one year before the petitioner’s actual need for the beneficiary’s services.[1] If adjudication itself takes longer than one year, the regular-processing option becomes almost meaningless.
USCIS’s answer is effectively: Pay for premium processing.
As of March 1, 2026, that means paying an additional $2,965 on top of filing fees that can already exceed $2,000.[2] Premium processing is supposed to be an optional expedited service. It was never intended to become a compulsory surcharge simply to receive a decision while the underlying job or event still exists.
Congress Specifically Prohibited This Result
In 2020, Congress enacted the Emergency Stopgap USCIS Stabilization Act. The law increased USCIS’s premium processing fees, expanded the types of immigration benefits that could qualify for premium processing and broadened how USCIS could use the resulting revenue.[3]
But Congress imposed an important condition. The Department of Homeland Security was required to ensure that implementation of the law did not increase processing times for cases outside premium processing or increase regular-processing times for benefit requests that were also eligible for premium processing.[4]
O and P petitions are designated for premium processing. Their regular-processing track is therefore within the class of cases Congress expressly intended to protect.
USCIS itself has acknowledged this obligation. In its 2022 implementing rule, DHS stated that the Stabilization Act prohibits USCIS from offering premium processing when doing so adversely affects regular processing.[5]
DHS also acknowledged that it could not simply take officers away from regular cases and assign them to premium cases. According to the agency:
“DHS generally cannot reallocate staff” without adversely affecting other processing times.
DHS therefore represented that it would hire and train additional staff and ensure that adequate information technology resources were in place before expanding premium processing.[6]
Yet regular O and P processing has deteriorated from approximately two or three months in my practice to upward of 15 months. At the same time, I have seen premium cases exceed the mandatory 15-business-day period without USCIS taking the required adjudicative action.
Something has gone very wrong.
The Problem Is Not Simply That More People Are Applying
USCIS received approximately 13.69 million applications and petitions during fiscal year 2025 and processed approximately 11.73 million. The agency therefore received nearly two million more cases than it completed, contributing to substantial growth in the backlog.[7]
But the developing fiscal year 2026 data tell a more complicated story. Among the form categories included in USCIS’s April 2026 data, the agency received approximately 320,000 fewer filings than it received in April 2025. Nevertheless, USCIS completed only about 40% as many cases as it completed during the same month one year earlier.[8]
In other words, intake declined in the reported categories, but adjudicative output declined much more sharply.
At the end of the first quarter of fiscal year 2026, USCIS reportedly had approximately 11.3 million cases pending, including an estimated net backlog of 6.3 million cases. USCIS completed only approximately 1.8 million cases during that quarter, a 41% decrease from the same quarter one year earlier.[9]
The current delays therefore cannot be explained solely by excessive new demand. USCIS is also processing dramatically fewer cases.
There are several possible contributing factors.
USCIS has increasingly centralized service-center workloads under Service Center Operations, commonly referred to as SCOPS. The agency has also reduced contractor support at service centers while transitioning from paper-based intake and records functions to electronic processing.
At the Vermont Service Center, 74 contractor employees reportedly received layoff notices in December 2024. Those employees represented nearly half of the approximately 170 remaining contractor workers at the facility. USCIS explained that the affected workers primarily performed data-entry and paper-records functions that the agency expected to reduce through increased electronic filing and processing.[10]
That explanation may sound reasonable in theory. In practice, O and P petitions remain document intensive. Many contain hundreds of pages of contracts, consultation letters, competition results, rankings, media coverage, awards and other supporting evidence. Electronic routing does not eliminate the need to receive, organize, review and adjudicate that evidence.
USCIS must also continually prioritize premium petitions over cases in the regular queue. That creates a predictable cycle: Regular cases take too long, so more petitioners pay for premium processing. USCIS must then devote additional capacity to premium cases, potentially leaving regular cases even further behind.
The result is a system in which the government financially benefits from the failure of its regular-processing service.
This Is More Than Poor Customer Service
USCIS has broad discretion in how it manages its workload. It does not, however, have unlimited discretion to disregard an express statutory condition imposed by Congress.
Congress authorized premium-processing revenue to be used to provide premium service, improve adjudication infrastructure, respond to adjudication demands, reduce pending cases and offset the cost of other adjudication services.[11] Congress did not authorize USCIS to allow regular processing to collapse while collecting thousands of additional dollars from petitioners who cannot afford to wait.
If USCIS expanded premium processing without adding sufficient adjudicative capacity, reassigned officers away from regular O and P petitions, or failed to monitor whether the expansion was increasing regular-processing times, its actions may violate the Stabilization Act’s non-degradation requirement.
At a minimum, USCIS owes the public an explanation.
The agency should disclose:
Regular and premium O and P receipts and completions by quarter;
Processing times separated by visa classification;
The number of adjudicators assigned to regular and premium petitions;
How premium-processing revenue has been spent;
The effect of staffing reductions and SCOPS restructuring on O and P cases;
The number of premium cases exceeding the 15-business-day deadline; and
The analysis USCIS performed to ensure that premium processing expansion would not harm regular processing.
USCIS’s published processing times do not provide that transparency. The agency generally calculates processing times retrospectively, based on how long it took to complete a specified percentage of recently adjudicated cases.[12] As delayed cases are eventually completed, the published processing time increases. That measures the deterioration; it does not justify it.
Premium Processing Must Remain Optional
I understand that immigration adjudication is complicated. Officers must review substantial evidence, apply evolving legal standards and protect the integrity of the immigration system.
But O and P petitions did not suddenly become five times more complicated. Nor should well-documented petitions sit untouched for more than a year simply because the petitioner did not pay an additional $2,965.
A 15-month processing time for a temporary work petition is not reasonable. It defeats the purpose of the visa classification, harms U.S. employers and events, disrupts athletes’ and artists’ careers and places lawful immigration opportunities out of reach for those who cannot afford premium processing.
Congress expressly required USCIS to protect regular processing times when implementing and expanding premium processing. USCIS should be required to demonstrate that it has complied with that obligation.
Until then, the dramatic deterioration in regular O and P processing appears to be more than an unfortunate backlog. It appears to be the precise outcome the USCIS Stabilization Act was intended to prevent.
Sources:
USCIS, Instructions for Form I-129, Petition for a Nonimmigrant Worker; see also 8 C.F.R. §§ 214.2(o)(2)(i) and 214.2(p)(2)(i).
USCIS, USCIS to Increase Premium Processing Fees (Jan. 9, 2026); USCIS, How Do I Request Premium Processing?.
Emergency Stopgap USCIS Stabilization Act, Pub. L. No. 116-159, div. D, tit. I, § 4102, 134 Stat. 709, 740–42 (2020); INA § 286(u), 8 U.S.C. § 1356(u).
Pub. L. No. 116-159, § 4102(c); Implementation of the Emergency Stopgap USCIS Stabilization Act, 87 Fed. Reg. 18,227, 18,233 (Mar. 30, 2022).
USCIS, Impact of the Homeland Security Act on Immigration Functions Transferred to DHS, Fiscal Year 2025 (Apr. 14, 2026).
Cecilia Esterline, Legal Immigration in Numbers: June 2026 Status Update, Niskanen Center (June 30, 2026), analyzing USCIS processing data through April 2026.
Id.
Corey McDonald, Layoffs Begin at Federal Immigration Center in Essex; Employees Fear More Will Come, VTDigger (Dec. 4, 2024).
INA § 286(u)(4), 8 U.S.C. § 1356(u)(4).
USCIS, Case Processing Times; USCIS, Historic Processing Times.