FAQ
Questions, answered.
What is this, exactly?+
Real, published USCIS Administrative Appeals Office (AAO) decisions on EB-2 National Interest Waiver petitions, made searchable. Every field we show you — dates, outcomes, findings — comes with a verbatim quote and a link back to the original PDF, so you can verify it yourself.
Does it cost anything?+
No. The Service is free, there's no account, and we don't sell reports or subscriptions.
Can it tell me if my petition will be approved?+
No, and we've deliberately built it not to. Every case here was denied and then appealed — that's a selection-biased sample, not a representative one, so it can't be used to calculate an approval rate for NIW petitions generally, and it can't predict what will happen with your specific petition. See Methodology for the full explanation.
Why does it only cover denials? Why not approved cases too?+
Structural, not a choice we made: the Administrative Appeals Office only issues a decision when someone appeals — and you can only appeal a denial. An approved petition never generates an AAO decision, because there's nothing to appeal. So "AAO decisions" and "denied-then-appealed cases" are the same set by definition. It's also why we can't tell you an approval rate.
Why does someone else's case matter to me? Mine is different.+
It won't match your facts, and it isn't meant to. What transfers is the reasoning: which specific evidence USCIS called insufficient, and why. If a petitioner's business plan and industry articles didn't establish national importance, that tells you what kind of evidence to strengthen in your own filing — even though your endeavor is different. Read it as "what USCIS scrutinizes on this element," not "what happens to people like me."
Is this a replacement for an immigration lawyer?+
No. This is a research tool, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. It's meant to help you (or your attorney) see what USCIS has actually said in comparable cases, so you can ask more specific questions — not to tell you what to file.
Where does the data come from?+
Directly from uscis.gov's published AAO non-precedent decisions. We download the original PDFs, extract structured fields with an LLM, and verify every extracted quote against the source text before it's shown. Full detail is on the Methodology page.
How accurate is the extraction?+
We measure this rather than assume it — see Methodology for the actual audited numbers on quote-matching accuracy and case classification accuracy, including where we found and fixed our own errors.
Do you cover EB-1A (extraordinary ability) cases too?+
We have EB-1A decisions downloaded and structured, but they're not searchable yet. We check our accuracy for a case type before publishing it, and haven't finished that for EB-1A's ten-criteria framework. NIW is the only searchable category right now.
Do you have every AAO decision?+
No — it covers AAO decisions from 2024 onward, with the gaps disclosed on the Methodology page. A federal court order requires USCIS to resume full historical publication by 2026-11-30, which will change what's available here over time.
How often is this updated?+
There's no fixed schedule yet — new decisions are added and verified in batches, not continuously. The Methodology page shows the build date each time it changes, so you can see how current the data is rather than assume a cadence we haven't built.