The Rural Bias Built Into EB-5’s DNA: Is USCIS’s I-956F Backlog Quietly Killing Urban EB-5 Deals?
By Mona Shah, Esq. & Rebecca Singh, Esq.
Part One: Why the Rural Queue Moves Faster, and Why That Isn’t an Accident
How a Senator from Iowa Rewrote the EB-5 Timeline
The EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program was created in 1990 with a straightforward premise: foreign capital, in exchange for permanent residency, would flow into commercial enterprises that create American jobs and, critically, into the communities that needed those jobs most.
The program’s original architects envisioned it as a vehicle for genuine economic development in distressed and underserved areas. For much of its early history, however, it became something rather different: a financing mechanism for luxury real estate in America’s most prosperous urban corridors, enabled by creative census tract gerrymandering that allowed developers to claim Targeted Employment Area status and the lower $500,000 investment threshold that came with it for projects that bore little resemblance to the program’s stated mission.
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) spent the better part of a decade trying to change that. As one of the EB-5 program’s most persistent and consequential legislative critics, Grassley argued repeatedly in committee hearings, in floor statements, and in successive reform proposals that the program had been captured by urban developers and their lobbyists, and that its benefits were flowing to Manhattan penthouses and luxury condominiums rather than to the rural and economically distressed communities for which the program was designed. It is worth noting, without particular surprise, that Senator Grassley represents Iowa. The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 (RIA) is, in significant part, the codification of that position. Its rural set-asides, reserved visa allocations, priority processing provisions, and higher investment thresholds for non-distressed areas collectively represent a legislative recalibration of the program toward Grassley’s original-intent framework: EB-5 capital should go where economic need is greatest, and rural America should be first in line.
This context matters because it reframes what the EB-5 industry has taken to calling a “processing disparity.” The gap between rural and urban I-956F approval times of approximately five to seven months on average, per IIUSA’s 2024 industry report, is not an administrative accident or a resource allocation failure.
Rather, it is, quite obviously, policy.
The rural processing queue moves faster because Congress, at Senator Grassley’s sustained urging, built a program in which rural projects are explicitly prioritized. Understanding that distinction is essential to understanding both what can realistically be done about it, and what investors should make of it.
The I-956F processing queue does not simply reflect how busy USCIS happens to be. It reflects a deliberate congressional judgment about which EB-5 projects deserve to move faster. Urban developers competing in that queue are not battling bureaucratic inefficiency, they are competing against statutory intent.
With the EB-5 grandfathering deadline of September 30, 2026 now visible on the horizon after which investors who have not yet filed may lose the protections of the current RIA framework the stakes of this design choice have never been more immediate.
What the Data Actually Shows
Processing Times at a Glance
| Project Type | Average | Typical Range (IIUSA) |
| Rural TEA | ~8 months | 4–15 months (some as fast as 2–3) |
| Urban / HUA TEA | ~13 months | 7–18 months |
Source: IIUSA Report, June 2024; EB5Investors.com reporting, 2025–2026; BAI Capital analysis, 2025.
The numbers are not in dispute. In June 2024, Invest In the USA (IIUSA) the EB-5 industry’s primary trade association released a comprehensive report drawing on anonymized case data from eleven regional center operators, covering 61 I-956F applications filed between June 2022 and August 2024. The findings were stark:
- Rural TEA projects: average I-956F approval time of 8 months, with a normal range of 4 to 15 months.
- High Unemployment Area projects: average approval time of 13 months, with a normal range of 7 to 18 months.
More recent industry reporting corroborates this. In early 2026, EB5Investors.com documented multiple rural TEA projects approved in two to four months. This included a rural coastal community, geothermal energy, and vertical farming projects, all approved in under three months, and several rural resort and hospitality developments in three to four months. Industry analysis of FY2025 data placed the median approval time for rural projects between seven and nine months, well ahead of the HUA category.
These numbers are not the product of chance or inconsistent staffing. They are the measurable output of a statutory priority system that Senator Grassley’s decade of advocacy helped design. The program is, in this respect, working exactly as intended which is precisely what makes the situation so difficult for urban developers to address. You cannot file a mandamus action against congressional intent.
Why the Gap Exists: Policy, Not Process
The processing disparity between rural and urban I-956F approvals has structural explanations, but they all trace back to the same legislative source:
Congressional prioritization by design. The RIA created reserved visa set-asides specifically for rural projects and provided USCIS with an explicit statutory basis to treat them as a priority category. This was not a drafting convenience but was the direct result of Senator Grassley’s sustained campaign to reorient the program toward its founding purpose. Grassley’s position, argued consistently since at least 2015, was that the TEA designation system had been systematically abused. Urban developers, working with willing state agencies, were aggregating non-contiguous census tracts to manufacture High Unemployment Area designations for projects in thriving city centers. The RIA’s tightened TEA rules, rural set-asides, and priority processing provisions were designed specifically to close that gap, and to ensure that the queue itself, reflects the congressional judgment that rural economic development is the program’s first obligation.
Simpler TEA designation. For a rural project, TEA qualification is primarily geographic: is the project outside a metropolitan statistical area? This is relatively straightforward to verify. For HUA projects, USCIS must confirm that the census tract or aggregated tracts reflect unemployment at 150% or more of the national average. This is a more contested, data-intensive analysis, made more rigorous under the RIA specifically because of the prior abuses Grassley identified.
Project complexity. Urban mixed-use developments in major metropolitan areas frequently involve layered financing structures, multiple tranches of capital, and more parties with decision-making authority, all of which must be disclosed and reviewed under the RIA’s enhanced transparency requirements. A rural hospitality or agricultural project is, in structural terms, simply a less complex application.
Volume. Urban and HUA projects represent a larger share of the total I-956F pipeline. Higher volume creates longer queues, even assuming equal processing efficiency.
Taken together, these factors produce a processing environment in which the rural queue moves faster by statute, by design, and by the weight of accumulated legislative intent. Urban developers who view this as an administrative problem to be solved are, in a meaningful sense, misidentifying the nature of the obstacle.
Marketability Discrimination, or Statutory Intent in Action?
Here is the question the EB-5 industry has been reluctant to ask plainly: if the I-956F processing disparity is the result of deliberate congressional design, rather than arbitrary administrative preference, can it credibly be characterized as discriminatory?
The answer requires precision. The Administrative Procedure Act (APA), 5 U.S.C. § 706, prohibits agency action that is “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.” Where an agency’s differential treatment of cases is grounded in explicit statutory direction —as USCIS’s rural prioritization is in the RIA, the APA’s arbitrary-and-capricious standard is a difficult threshold to meet. A five-month processing gap that is traceable to a congressional mandate is not, in legal terms, the same as one that reflects unexplained administrative inconsistency.
I-956F approval has become a de facto marketing credential.
What is not in dispute is the practical market impact. I-956F approval has become a de facto marketing credential. A project with an approved I-956F can demonstrate to investors that USCIS has vetted the business plan, the job creation model, and the offering structure. Investors filing I-526E petitions on approved projects are not subject to re-review of the project. Thus, only their own source of funds and personal eligibility are assessed. That is a material advantage in both speed and perceived risk profile.
A project without I-956F approval, by contrast, is asking investors to commit capital to a project whose regulatory status remains unconfirmed. In a market characterized by visa retrogression concerns, a narrowing grandfathering window, and heightened investor due diligence — the absence of an approved I-956F is a significant commercial liability. Whether one calls it discrimination or design, the effect on the fundraising market is the same.
Urban and HUA developers are competing in a capital-raising market where their path to the credential investors most value is, by statute, longer than their rural counterparts. Senator Grassley’s program has a queue — and urban projects are, by design, toward the back of it. The market calls this a disadvantage. Washington calls it a feature.
The September 2026 Deadline -“Urgency by Design”
The RIA’s grandfathering provision, which protects investors who file I-526E petitions on or before September 30, 2026 from future program changes, is itself a product of the same legislative framework that prioritized rural processing. For urban and HUA developers, it creates a compounding structural problem.
A rural project filing its I-956F today can, based on current data, expect approval in three to eight months, comfortably within the window required to market to investors, close subscriptions, and support I-526E filings before the September 2026 deadline. An urban or HUA project filing today faces an average processing time of thirteen months, with normal ranges extending to eighteen months. Simple arithmetic places many of those approvals in late 2026 or 2027 after the grandfathering deadline has passed.
The result is that some urban developers may find themselves with an approved I-956F at precisely the moment it has lost its most valuable marketing context: the ability to support investor filings under the current RIA framework. This is not a market accident. It is the foreseeable consequence of a processing priority system operating against a fixed statutory deadline. Senator Grassley’s program, it turns out, was designed for a timeline that suits rural projects rather better than urban ones.
Part Two: You Cannot Sue Your Way Past a Statute
Remedies, Realities, and the Question Every EB-5 Investor Should Be Asking
The One Area Where Project Type Makes No Difference: EADs and Advance Parole
It is worth noting, clearly and without ambiguity, that not every aspect of EB-5 administration reflects the project-type disparity described above. Employment Authorization Documents (EADs) and Advance Parole (AP) travel permits are notable exceptions, and the contrast is instructive.
Investors present in the United States on a nonimmigrant visa, such as an H-1B, F-1, or L-1, at the time they file their I-526E petition may concurrently file for Adjustment of Status (AOS), provided a visa number is available or expected to become available. Upon filing for AOS, those investors are eligible to apply for an EAD, granting work authorization in the United States, and Advance Parole, permitting international travel during the pendency of the green card process. Current processing times for EAD and AP approvals run approximately seven to nine months, a significant increase from previous processing time of three to five months.
There is no Grassley queue at the EAD and AP level.
At this stage, USCIS applies identical processing standards regardless of whether the underlying investment is in a rural TEA or an urban HUA. An investor backing a geothermal energy project in rural Utah and an investor in a full-service branded hotel in Midtown Manhattan receive the same procedural treatment. There is no Grassley queue at the EAD and AP level. Congress did not build a rural preference into work authorization processing only into project approval and visa set-asides.
This matters because EAD and AP benefits are, for many investors, particularly those on employer-sponsored visas facing renewal uncertainty or career mobility constraints, among the most immediate and tangible immigration benefits the EB-5 process delivers. Investors should understand that while the I-956F queue reflects a statutory rural priority, the personal immigration benefits available on concurrent filing do not. That distinction is consequential for investors evaluating projects against a personal immigration timeline rather than a developer’s marketing calendar.
What If I-956F Approval Arrives After September 2026?
This scenario is not hypothetical. Urban and HUA projects filing I-956F applications in 2025 and early 2026 face a documented probability of receiving USCIS approval in late 2026 or 2027.
The implications are significant. A project receiving I-956F approval in, say, December 2026 will be marketing to investors in a post-grandfathering environment, one whose rules, investment thresholds, and program structure may have changed. Regional center operators may find they have invested substantial time and capital in securing USCIS project approval, only to enter a market where the statutory framework has shifted or investor appetite has moved on.
For investors who filed I-526E petitions before September 2026 on projects whose I-956F was pending at the time of filing, the legal picture remains uncertain. USCIS has indicated that project-level approval must be in place for the petition to be fully processable. A prolonged I-956F delay is unlikely to render a timely-filed investor petition stalled past the grandfathering window, though this has not been definitively tested in litigation. Investors in this position should maintain close contact with qualified immigration counsel.
Is There a Legal Remedy? And Is It Worth Pursuing?
For a developer or regional center facing extended I-956F processing delays, litigation is the most obvious remedy. Given the statutory underpinning of the rural priority system, however, it is also the least likely to succeed.
The Legal Basis. A mandamus action under 28 U.S.C. § 1361 compels a federal official to perform a duty owed to the petitioner. To succeed, a plaintiff must demonstrate: (1) a clear right to relief; (2) a clear duty by the agency to act; and (3) no other adequate remedy. Courts have granted mandamus in EB-5 related cases, though typically in cases of extreme delay. An APA unreasonable delay claim under 5 U.S.C. § 706(1) provides a closely related alternative, allowing a court to compel agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed.
The TRAC Factors. Courts evaluating unreasonable delay claims apply the six-factor TRAC analysis (Telecommunications Research & Action Center v. FCC, 750 F.2d 70, D.C. Cir. 1984). These factors include the rule of reason governing agency timelines, whether Congress has signaled urgency, the interests prejudiced by delay, and the effect of expediting one petitioner on others in the queue. The last factor is particularly challenging here: a court order prioritizing one urban or HUA project necessarily disadvantages others waiting in the same queue.
The Grassley Problem for Litigants. The deeper difficulty for any mandamus or APA claimant is that USCIS’s rural prioritization is not an unexplained administrative preference; it is traceable to explicit statutory direction in the RIA. Demonstrating that the differential treatment is arbitrary requires showing it lacks a rational statutory basis. Given that Congress expressly created rural visa set-asides, priority processing, and reserved allocations, that argument faces a formidable statutory record. Courts are reluctant to second-guess agency resource allocation decisions that track congressional intent, and USCIS’s fee-funded operational constraints provide an additional procedural shield.
Likelihood of Success. Litigation should be considered a last resort. Cases involving extreme delays, well beyond the documented normal range, and specific, demonstrable prejudice tied to the September 2026 deadline have the strongest prospect. Developers seeking to accelerate processing that is merely at the slower end of the documented range face a much higher bar. The statutory architecture Senator Grassley built is, for now, the law and federal courts have shown little appetite for rewriting it on a developer’s behalf.
Solutions Short of Litigation
Engage USCIS’s IPO directly. The Immigrant Investor Program Office has historically been responsive to coordinated industry input on processing efficiencies. Advocacy through IIUSA, AILA, and regional center associations has contributed to past improvements and remains the most accessible first channel.
Expedite requests where eligible. USCIS’s expedite criteria include severe financial loss and compelling emergent interests. For developers facing documented investor pipeline losses tied to the September 2026 deadline, a well-supported expedite request is worth filing, even if success rates are uneven.
Congressional engagement. The processing disparity is ultimately a legislative design question, not an administrative one. Sustained engagement with members of Congress who represent EB-5-active urban constituencies, framed around the economic development contributions of urban HUA projects, is the only avenue that could, over time, rebalance the statutory framework Senator Grassley constructed. This is a medium-term effort, not a September 2026 solution. And given the current political environment’s enthusiasm for deregulation in some areas and entrenchment in others, ‘medium-term’ may be a generous estimate.
Application preparation quality. Industry data consistently shows that well-prepared applications generate fewer RFEs and move faster through review. This does not resolve the structural disparity, but it is the one variable within a developer’s direct control.
Should USCIS Give Preferential Treatment to Established Regional Centers?
Anecdotal and reported evidence suggests that regional centers with multiple prior I-956F approvals, demonstrated compliance histories, clean applications, and no material RFEs, tend to receive faster processing than newer or less established operators. From a pure efficiency standpoint, this is understandable. A USCIS adjudicator who has reviewed fifteen applications from the same operator, all to a high standard, may reasonably apply a lighter touch to the sixteenth.
There is, however, a significant policy problem embedded in this practice. The EB-5 program was intended to support capital investment across a broad range of projects and sponsors. This includes new entrants, smaller regional centers, and first-time developers. If faster processing becomes, in practice, a reward for incumbency, USCIS is layering an additional structural advantage onto established operators that neither Congress mandated nor the RIA’s integrity provisions contemplated.
The RIA’s transparency and integrity requirements were intended to raise standards across the board, not to create a compliance fast lane for operators who already had USCIS’s trust. If newer or smaller operators face systematically longer processing times as a result of their relative novelty rather than their application quality, the program’s competitive equity is doubly compromised: first by the rural-urban statutory divide, and then by an informal incumbency premium layered on top of it.
Processing speed should reflect application quality, completeness, and the project category priority that Congress established. It should not reflect how many times a regional center has been through the process before. USCIS has an obligation to enforce that distinction clearly, though the industry would be forgiven for noting that the obligation and the practice are not always the same thing.
Does Processing Speed Tell the Whole Story?
The processing disparity is a legitimate industry concern. But before investors allow it to become the deciding factor in project selection, a more fundamental question deserves consideration: are rural and urban EB-5 projects actually comparable investments, or is the impulse to rank them by USCIS processing speed a category error?
Senator Grassley’s legislative framework assumes that the program’s primary obligation is economic development in areas of genuine need, and that capital flowing to gateway city projects, however well-structured, is capital that has drifted from that mission. That is a coherent policy position. It is not, however, a reliable guide to investment quality.
Consider two projects currently in the market. The first is a full-service, internationally branded hotel in the heart of one of the world’s most visited urban entertainment districts, attracting tens of millions of annual visitors, operating under a globally recognized franchise flag, with revenue projections developed in consultation with its hotel management company and franchisor. It sits in an urban HUA TEA. Its I-956F, if filed today, will likely arrive sometime in 2026 or 2027.
The second is a resort community or rural residential development in rural Pennsylvania or Tennessee, a genuine project with legitimate economic development credentials, but one whose commercial fundamentals rest on regional tourism demand, seasonal visitor patterns, and a more limited catchment area. Its I-956F was approved in three to four months.
Which is the better investment? That depends entirely on what the investor is optimizing for and the answer is not obvious!
If the September 2026 grandfathering deadline is a binding constraint, the rural project’s processing advantage is real and material. For an investor who needs to file before the deadline, a project with an approved I-956F may be essential rather than merely convenient.
But if the investor’s horizon extends beyond the immigration timeline, if capital preservation is equally important, if they can absorb a longer approval wait, if they are asking not just “will I get my green card?” but “will I get my $800,000 back?”, the analysis shifts substantially. A full-service hotel in one of the world’s premier hospitality markets, backed by an international brand’s revenue guidance and the depth of a gateway city’s commercial real estate market, may represent a materially stronger capital security position than a rural development where demand projections are more exposed to regional economic conditions and seasonal variability.
The market is not well served when the I-956F queue effectively pre-selects investor attention before the economics of the underlying project have been properly considered.
Urban projects of institutional scale also tend to carry more sophisticated deal structures: senior lender involvement, established exit mechanisms, and greater liquidity in the underlying real estate market. These are structural features that matter to investors whose primary concern is repayment, not just immigration status.
Processing speed measures how quickly USCIS reviews a file. It does not measure the underlying economic resilience of the investment, the strength of the exit strategy, or the probability that the investor’s capital will be repaid. Senator Grassley’s program was designed to channel capital toward rural need. It was not designed to serve as an investment quality filter — and investors who treat it as one are accepting a framing that the data does not support.
The EB-5 program was designed as an immigration-by-investment vehicle, not a pure investment product. But investors who treat it as purely an immigration mechanism, subordinating all economic analysis to processing speed, accept risks that a more balanced evaluation would surface. The market is not well served when the I-956F queue effectively pre-selects investor attention before the economics of the underlying project have been properly considered.
The Clock Has Hands, and Congress Put Them There
The EB-5 program has improved significantly since the RIA’s enactment in 2022. Processing times are faster across the board. Compliance standards are higher. I-956F approvals are arriving in months rather than years for rural projects. These are real advances.
But the gap between rural and urban processing times is not an administrative anomaly waiting to be corrected. As explained in Part 1, it is a policy outcome that Senator Grassley and his colleagues designed into the program’s architecture. Urban and HUA developers operating as though this disparity can be dissolved through advocacy, litigation, or administrative pressure are competing against statutory intent as much as against processing backlogs. The former is considerably harder to dislodge than the latter.
For investors, the urgency of September 2026 is real but so is the risk of allowing processing timelines to substitute for investment analysis. The program Congress built favors rural projects in the queue. It does not follow that rural projects are categorically superior investments. Those are distinct judgments, and investors who conflate them are doing themselves a disservice.
The clock, as it turns out, has very specific hands. And Congress put them there.
References & Sources
IIUSA. (2024). Report on Actual I-956F and I-526E Processing Times. Invest In the USA.
EB5Investors.com. (2026, February). Recent USCIS I-956F Approvals Confirm Quicker Processing Time.
EB5Investors.com. (2025). EB-5 Projects See Increasingly Faster I-956F Approvals.
EB5Investors.com. (2025). EB-5 Projects Gain Speed as USCIS Pushes Out Quicker I-956F Approvals.
BAI Capital. (2025). EB-5 Projects See Record I-956F Approvals.
EB5 United. (2025). EB5 United Nears 300 Priority Processing Approvals in the Post-RIA Era.
Colombo & Hurd Attorneys. (2025). EB-5 I-526E Petition 2025 Guide.
Second Wind EB-5. (2025). EB-5 Visa Processing Time 2025: Updated for I-526 Petitions.
EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 (RIA), Pub. L. 117-103, Division BB.
Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. § 706.
28 U.S.C. § 1361 (Mandamus statute).
Telecommunications Research & Action Center v. FCC, 750 F.2d 70 (D.C. Cir. 1984) (TRAC factors).
Senator Chuck Grassley, Senate Judiciary Committee, Statements on EB-5 Reform (2015–2022).