My EAD card production delay saga
I had applied for my post-completion OPT on March 20th, 2018. I was due to graduate on June 17, 2018 and I was going to fly out the very next day back home with my parents (this was booked waaay in advance, and in hindsight, should never have been done). For this reason, I wanted to apply at the very earliest. March 20th was exactly 90 days before my graduation date and the earliest date at which I could apply, hence I sent the mail to USCIS on March 19th by priority mail.
Within a few days I received the receipt notice from the USCIS by regular mail, with my receipt number with which I could track my case’s status on their website. Little did I know that this would become my most hotly visited website EVER.
The USCIS system is notoriously opaque — you have no way of knowing what the state of your application is or how far along it is. Things only change when a decision is made, which could be whenever. Calling customer support is also quite unhelpful, because they would quote broad, outer-limit timelines to wait before they’d be able to help out. For instance, for the approval phase of the application, you are instructed to wait 90 days, which was freaking me out, because of my travel plans (again, a bad idea in hindsight).
The various case states
From my research online, my understanding is that a typical Form I-765 case goes through the following 6 states, in the ideal scenario (i.e. no RFEs, no errors on your part etc.) It is also my understanding that certain states may skip being shown on the USCIS online case status page, i.e. it might jump directly from 1 to 3, or 3 to 5.
- Case was received
- Case was approved
- New Card Is Being Produced
- Card Was Mailed To Me
- Card Was Picked Up By The United States Postal Service
- Card Was Delivered To Me By The Post Office
The start — case approval
On day 70 (May 29, 2018), my status changed to “New Card Is Being Produced”. I was ecstatic — because after this, the card would be in my hand in about a week, according to normal timelines.
What this also meant was that my OPT application had been approved — which was relieving, given the atmosphere of confusion and rejections that was in the air. I had a job offer in hand already, and my degree was from a reputable institution, so I believed I was in good shape.
However, I kept checking the status daily (hourly) and nothing changed for more than a week — I started to get a little worried and kept reading extensively on other peoples’ experiences online. Customer support was not too helpful — the automated voice said “please allow 30 days to receive your card” and the Tier 1 officers I spoke to said that it can take “upto 60 days” and I wouldn’t be able to initiate an enquiry into their system before that time. Just great! Also, my school’s international advisors advised against changing the address to a friend/family member at this stage since the application had already been approved and the change could take “upto 30 days” to reflect in their system! Also, travelling abroad without the EAD card and then having someone ship it to me was absolutely ill-advised (card could get lost, card arrival could take longer than my start date meaning I wouldn’t be able to travel back to the US etc). Hence, I was kind of stuck in frustrating limbo and had to stay put where I was.
The data — how long should this take?
Turns out this is a more common problem than I’d thought and one that I should’ve planned for. It seems that, for 90%-ish of cases, you should have your card within a week. Here’s a histogram of data I painstakingly collected from friends and by scouring the internet which shows the distribution of days it would take to go from state 3to 4:
As you can see, the card should get shipped out in 4–6 days (the extra 2 days probably coming from a weekend in between) after approval. Beyond that, it would take more than 15 days. Since it had been more than a week for me at this point, I already delayed my flight and started planning alternate arrangements. Since my campus housing contract would expire after graduation, I planned out the collection of my mail (when it would arrive) from them after moving out.
Minor breakthrough?
On Jun 21st, something weird happened. My status was unchanged, but the date of “card production ordering” had changed:
I called up customer support and it turns out that their system (which probably operates on batch processing) had re-ordered production after noting that the card had not yet been shipped out. I suppose this is auto-initiated after about 3 weeks, and hence we are told to “allow 30 days”. This would have been useful information for me earlier!
Happy ending — shipment and arrival as expected
The card was finally shipped to me on Jun 26th (5 days after production was re-ordered) and arrived on Jun 28th as expected and predicted in the USPS tracking interface. I was taking nothing for granted and was tracking things obsessively at this point. The day I received my card was perhaps one of the best days ever, and was a whole MONTH after my case was approved. In total, the whole process took 98 days from the day I mailed the documents out to the day I received my EAD card in-hand.
Summary — actionable points:
- If your card isn’t shipped out within a week, it’s most likely going to jump straight to taking a month.
- Do not make plans to travel outside the US in the summer after your graduation if you are planning to do OPT!
- Make sure that the address you provide in your I-765 form is one which you’ll have access to the mailbox of for several months. Changing the address at a later time is NOT advised.
I hope this post helps ease the frustrations of anyone who may be in this situation! I wish I would’ve researched these risks ahead of time and made plans accordingly. In any case, it was a good adventure and a great exercise in decision making under uncertainty, something I see myself doing a lot in my life and career, so I’d put this down as great practice!