Your case status is not your file. Here is who holds the records, and how long each one takes to hand them over

Requests for USCIS records used to arrive by post, usually on Form G-639, and that form was always optional; the law lets you write a letter. Since 22 January 2026 the postal route is closed. The Department of Homeland Security stopped accepting hard-copy and emailed Freedom of Information Act requests for its records across the department, and USCIS requests now go through the online system at first.uscis.gov, which needs a USCIS account first.

The practical consequence is that a request posted the old way does not sit in a queue. It is not received. People who filed by post in the first weeks of the change, following instructions copied from an older guide, spent the spring assuming their request was in progress. Anything that tells you to mail Form G-639 to a Missouri address was written before the change and should be ignored.

The Freedom of Information Act gives an agency 20 business days to make a determination on a request. Business days exclude weekends and federal holidays, so 20 of them is roughly four calendar weeks. The statute allows one extension of up to 10 further working days in unusual circumstances, which the agency has to notify you about in writing before the first deadline passes, along with the date it now expects to finish.

Set against that, USCIS does not publish a fixed turnaround for these requests. What it publishes instead is a rolling average, shown on the status-check page of the online system, and that figure moves with the backlog. This site does not reproduce the number, because a figure that changes weekly is worse than useless once it is printed somewhere it will not be updated. Look it up at the moment you need it.

The gap between the statutory deadline and actual performance is not a matter of opinion. In Nightingale v. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, brought in the Northern District of California, the court found that the agencies had systematically failed to meet the deadlines the statute sets, granted declaratory relief, and ordered determinations on the backlogged requests within 60 days along with quarterly reports on compliance. USCIS reported cutting its A-file backlog sharply in the first year. Sustained compliance has been a different question, and the litigation is worth knowing about for one practical reason: a request that has run well past the statutory clock is a known problem with a documented history, not a sign that something unusual is happening to you.

This is the part that costs people the most time. For a case currently before an immigration court or the Board of Immigration Appeals, a Freedom of Information Act request is not required to get the record of proceedings. Since a change in March 2022, the respondent, a parent or guardian of the respondent, or the attorney or representative of record can ask the court that holds the case directly, by post, by email, or in person.

The email addresses follow a fixed shape: EOIR, then the three-letter code for the court, then ROP.Requests, at usdoj.gov. The record can include the audio recordings of the hearings as well as the documents both sides filed. For a case that has closed, that direct route is no longer open and a Freedom of Information Act request is needed, submitted through the Public Access Link or by post; since 1 December 2022 the immigration review office has not accepted these requests by email.

So the question that decides which route you use is whether the case is still active, and people in active proceedings routinely file the slower request because the faster one is not widely known.

Anyone in a nonimmigrant status can pull their own arrival and departure history covering the previous five years from the CBP I-94 website, with a name, date of birth, passport number and country of issue. It is immediate and it costs nothing.

United States citizens and lawful permanent residents cannot use that feature, which is the opposite of what most people assume. For them, and for anyone who needs crossings older than the five-year window, travel history is a records request to Customs and Border Protection, and it is generally the slowest of the three agencies covered here.

A naturalization application asks you to account for your own history, under oath, and an officer will be reading a file you have never seen. Where the history is long or complicated, an old arrest, a period out of status, an earlier application filed by someone else on your behalf, a name recorded differently on two forms, the standard advice is to read the file first and reconcile the record before signing anything.

The timing matters more than the advice. If the whole A-file is what you need and the request has to be made before an application that is itself measured in months, the request belongs at the start of the process rather than the middle of it. Waiting until an interview notice arrives leaves no room for the request to run its course, and none at all for an appeal if the response comes back incomplete.

For most people, nothing. Under the Homeland Security rules the first two hours of search time and the first 100 pages are not charged for, and combined search and duplication charges have to exceed $14 before anything is billed at all. Where charges do apply, search is billed by the quarter hour at clerical, professional, or managerial rates and copies at ten cents each.

Making a request counts as agreeing to pay up to $25 of any fees that turn out to be chargeable. USCIS asks that no payment is sent with the request and says it will make contact if fees arise, so an upfront demand for money is a signal that you are not dealing with the agency.