CAST reviewed 1,440 nonprecedent Administrative Appeals Office opinions issued between 2006 and June 2026. The dataset includes both Form I-914 T nonimmigrant status cases and applications to adjust status based on T status.

AAO Opinion Volume by Year

The number of published opinions increased sharply beginning in 2021. The largest increase occurred in 2025 and the first half of 2026.

These figures measure published AAO opinions, not the total number of applications filed or decided by USCIS.

Form I-914 Outcomes by Year

This table includes only appeals involving Form I-914 applications for T nonimmigrant status. It excludes T adjustment-of-status opinions.

Remands in Form I-914 cases were concentrated between 2020 and 2024. The remand rate was approximately 39% in both 2021 and 2022 and reached 42.1% in 2024. That pattern changed sharply in the two most recent years: only five of the 178 I-914 opinions issued in 2025 were remanded, and only four of the 430 opinions issued through June 2026 were remanded.

Direct grants were extremely rare. Only two of the 1,325 I-914 appeals in the dataset resulted in a grant.

Recent Form I-914 Outcomes

The recent increase in published I-914 opinions has been driven overwhelmingly by dismissals. Of the 608 I-914 opinions issued in 2025 and the first six months of 2026, 599 were dismissed and nine were remanded.

Primary Issues in Form I-914 and Related Opinions

A small number of opinions contain more than one basis tag. The table therefore reflects coded issue counts rather than a perfectly mutually exclusive distribution.

Severe Form of Trafficking: Factual Patterns in the Opinions

There are 449 Form I-914 opinions in which Severe Form of Trafficking is the controlling basis of denial. The broad legal classifications and the more specific factual settings are both multi-select fields. An opinion may therefore appear in more than one row, and the percentages should not be added together.

Specific factual settings (nonexclusive)

Physical Presence: Substantive Issues Analyzed

There are 200 Form I-914 opinions in which physical presence on account of trafficking is the controlling issue. The table below reports the substantive physical-presence topics actually coded in those opinions. Because one opinion may analyze several theories—for example, departure, continued victimization, and a new incident of trafficking—the rows overlap.

The data show that departure-and-reentry questions and continued victimization are the most frequently coded physical-presence issues. Twenty-six opinions do not contain one of the listed substantive physical-presence tags; those cases remain identified as subtype not coded rather than being assigned a theory by inference.

T Adjustment-of-Status Outcomes by Year

This table includes only opinions involving Form I-485 applications to adjust status based on T nonimmigrant status.

The outcomes in the adjustment cases look substantially different from the I-914 outcomes. Forty percent of the adjustment opinions were remanded, compared with 11.5% of the I-914 opinions.

All seven direct grants in the adjustment dataset were issued in 2018. Because several of those opinions appear to arise from related principal and derivative cases, the number of grants should be understood as the number of published opinions, not necessarily seven unrelated factual matters.

Recent T Adjustment of Status Outcomes

The adjustment dataset is much smaller, so percentages can change substantially based on only a few opinions. During 2025 and the first six months of 2026, 23 of the 25 adjustment opinions were dismissed and two were remanded.

T Adjustment of Status Opinions: Substantive Issues

The database contains 115 T adjustment-of-status opinions. These opinions are analyzed separately from initial Form I-914 appeals. The table below reports the substantive adjustment issues coded in Other Topics of Analysis. The categories overlap because an opinion may address more than one requirement or procedural issue.

Accessing the CAST’s AAO Opinions Database

CAST’s AAO Opinions Database for T visa cases is available through Airtable. Access is provided to practitioners who have completed the relevant CAST e-learning course or live training through Canvas.

After completing the training, submit the database access form to request login credentials. For instructions on obtaining access, navigating the database, and using its search and filtering tools, see How to Access and Use CAST's AAO Opinion Table.

Publication Note

These counts describe the opinions available in the USCIS repository and entered in the CAST database; they are not approval or denial rates for all T visa or adjustment applications adjudicated by USCIS. A single AAO opinion reflects an appealed or motion-based case and should not be treated as representative of the full application population.