Over the past several months, practitioners have been asking us the same question: what is happening with bona fide determinations? BFD decisions have felt arbitrary. Some applications receive BFDs and others do not, often with little or no explanation in the notice. To see whether there are trends behind these decisions, CAST has created a survey to collect information from the field.

As part of our ongoing review of AAO T visa decisions, we have analyzed several additional substantive T visa and adjustment of status opinions.

Here is our current rolling count:

• 28 substantive T visa appeals adjudicated since September 2025: 26 dismissed, 2 remanded, 0 granted
• 14 substantive T adjustment decisions adjudicated in 2026: 11 dismissed, 3 remanded, 0 granted

The T visa appeal count excludes invalid-signature dismissals, adjustment of status decisions, and non-substantive derivative cases. We are now separately tracking substantive T adjustment decisions because enough have been issued this year to make that a useful category on its own.

USCIS has released new T visa processing data through the third quarter of fiscal year 2026. CAST has also updated the AAO T Visa Opinion Database with the agency’s newly posted decisions.

Since our July 27 update, CAST has added another group of AAO T visa opinions to the database. Most of the newly posted cases were, once again, dismissals involving signature defects, rather than substantive T visa eligibility determinations.

On the substantive T visa side, we have now analyzed 24 appeals adjudicated since November 2025. This is an ongoing cumulative count and excludes invalid-signature dismissals and T adjustment or derivative cases.

22 dismissed, 2 remanded, 0 granted

• 15 turned on severe form of trafficking
• 5 turned on physical presence
• 2 turned on extreme hardship
• 2 turned on inadmissibility issues

As always, this is not a statement of agreement with the AAO—just an outline of what the AAO has found so far.

USCIS reports that 80% of Form I-914 (T visa) cases are currently completed within 32 months, based on the agency’s live Case Processing Times tool.[i] The agency’s own historical data shows the median T-1 case took 28.4 months in fiscal year 2026, through May 31, 2026, up from 14.9 months just two fiscal years earlier.[ii]

Those numbers describe the T visas in general. For an individual applicant, they raise the question of what this means for their individual cases.

Using USCIS’s own published statistics, it is possible to build a data-based estimate for any filing period. Applying that method to a case filed in January 2025, for example, finds that at the pace USCIS is adjudicating T-1 cases right now, that case is not projected to reach a decision until on the order of 2042, a total wait of roughly 17 years from filing to decision.

This post explains where that number comes from and how anyone can check it.