A caller to the Immigration Answer Show filed his wife’s N-400 in Atlanta in November 2025. Nine months later there has been no interview and no movement, while people he knows in other cities reach oath ceremonies. Founding attorney Jim Hacking told him the stall is not an accident.
mic What the Attorney Says
“I think that USCIS is affirmatively slowing down naturalization cases. Uh, one of the attorneys in our office was talking to a USCIS officer the other day in a city, a southern city that was not Atlanta, and they said, ‘Yeah, they’re just arbitrarily throttling and and telling us to slow down naturalizing people because they think they’re going to um vote Democratic, and so they’re trying to keep them from from becoming citizens.’”
That is one officer, relayed secondhand through an attorney at Hacking’s firm. But it tracks the public numbers. The Niskanen Center’s monthly tally of USCIS data shows the agency completed 27,569 naturalization applications in April 2026, down from more than 97,000 in April 2025 and from an average above 78,000 a month over the prior year. Average N-400 processing time rose from 6.4 months to 9.5 in the same window. And 18 percent of April 2026 completions were denials, more than double the rate a year earlier.
The Atlanta caller’s wife is from one of the 75 countries under the current visa pause, but Hacking said that “shouldn’t affect it,” and a travel-ban-country passport does not bar naturalization. The slowdown he described is not about her file. A second caller on the same show, out of the Sacramento field office, filed in May 2025, had her biometrics reused, and is still waiting for an interview 14 months later. She had heard the delays were connected to voting. “I don’t think it’s legal, but I think that’s what they’re doing,” Hacking told her.
None of this exists as announced policy. There is no public memo directing field offices to slow naturalizations; what Hacking described is verbal, office-level, and deniable. That gap between practice and paper is why the remedy he pointed both callers toward is a federal lawsuit. The Administrative Procedure Act requires agencies to conclude matters “within a reasonable time” under 5 U.S.C. § 555(b), and courts can compel action “unreasonably delayed” under 5 U.S.C. § 706(1).
mic What the Attorney Says
“Any government agency that has an issue in front of it has to decide it within a reasonable amount of time. So the question is does making you wait from May of 2025 until July or August of 2026. Is that a reasonable time? The answer to that question is no.”
The better-known naturalization remedy, 8 U.S.C. § 1447(b), only starts running 120 days after the naturalization interview, at which point a federal court can take the case away from USCIS. Neither caller has had an interview, so the claim available to them is APA unreasonable delay, not the 1447(b) clock.
Hacking gave the Atlanta caller a threshold rather than a prediction: “if you get to 12 months, we could sue at that point.” For applicants inside the slowdown, that is the practical shape of the problem. The throttling, if that is what it is, was admitted out loud exactly once, to a lawyer, off the record. What an applicant controls is the calendar, and at 12 months without an interview the calendar becomes the complaint.
Sources
- Niskanen Center — Legal Immigration in Numbers (monthly USCIS data tracker) open_in_new
- 5 U.S.C. § 555(b) — Agencies must conclude matters within a reasonable time (Cornell LII) open_in_new
- 5 U.S.C. § 706(1) — Courts may compel agency action unreasonably delayed (Cornell LII) open_in_new
- 8 U.S.C. § 1447(b) — Federal court jurisdiction 120 days after the naturalization examination (Cornell LII) open_in_new
- Immigration Answer Show — episode 1085 (July 13, 2026) open_in_new