Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

U.S. Website Gave False Approval to Green Card Applicants — Then Blamed Glitch and Took It Away

“It was heartbreaking,” said one recipient of a false approval who was told about a USCIS website snafu.

When Jesse Miranda, a U.S. citizen, sponsored an application for a green card for his wife nearly a year ago, he understood the process would take time.

On Wednesday, when he saw someone posting on Reddit that they had received sudden approval for a loved one’s initial application for permanent residence, he wondered if he and his wife had gotten lucky.

Miranda quickly went to check the application status on the website of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees visas and naturalization.

“What kind of glitch causes these mass approvals?”

“What kind of glitch causes these mass approvals?”

To his delight, the portal showed that their application had also been approved to move on to the next step in the process. Yet he had a nagging suspicion: Was this coming too soon? Wait times for approval of just the first step in the process can stretch more than two years, so could his wife’s application really be getting moved along so quickly?

When he called the agency’s helpline Thursday morning to confirm the approval, his suspicions proved correct. Miranda said the employee answering his call told him that his wife’s application status was unchanged.

And they weren’t the only people affected: According to Miranda, the employee acknowledged that USCIS was aware of a glitch affecting numerous applicants.

“It was heartbreaking,” Miranda told The Intercept of learning that their application status had not in fact changed. “I get that there’s technical stuff behind the scenes, but at the same time, what kind of glitch causes these mass approvals?”

The apparent glitch resulted in dozens or more applicants for green cards receiving false notices of approval for a key step in the process, according to multiple people who received the false approvals and accounts of similar approvals posted online. (USCIS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

In addition to Miranda, The Intercept spoke with two other green card applicants who received false notices of approval for the I-130 form, the first major hurdle in the process for obtaining a permanent residency visa for relatives of a U.S. citizen.

Dozens more people on Reddit and a user on an immigration-related Discord server reported experiencing the same false approval notices when they checked their application status on Wednesday and Thursday.

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