I-589 processing times · Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal
Latest USCIS data: Jan–Mar 2026, from the All USCIS Application and Petition Form Types report.
Estimated wait
20+ years
+4279% vs. previous quarter
Pending applications
1,414,955
unchanged vs. previous quarter
Decided in Jan–Mar 2026
281
−98% vs. previous quarter
Approval rate
23%
+5% vs. previous quarter
Quarter-over-quarter highlight: The pile of pending I-589 applications at USCIS stayed at 1,414,955 in Jan–Mar 2026. At that quarter's pace of decisions, clearing it would take 20+ years, up from 20+ years.
What happened to the applications
The bars are the I-589 decisions USCIS made each quarter, approved in blue and denied in red. The amber line is the backlog: how many applications were still waiting at the end of that quarter, most of them filed in earlier ones. The dashed line is how many came in.
New quarters show up here within a day of USCIS publishing them and are stored in a JSON file on GitHub.
How long the wait is
The estimated wait is how long it would take to decide every pending application if USCIS kept up that quarter’s pace. USCIS does not publish a processing time for this form in these reports.