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# USCIS Updates (email)

active · ingestion health: quiet · Executive · Tier 2 · email bulletin · Department of Homeland Security (USCIS)

Official site: https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom · All sources: [sources.md](../sources.md)

## What this source is

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services adjudicates immigration and naturalization benefits. Its bulletins carry policy-manual updates, form revisions, filing-fee and processing changes, and program announcements that determine how applications are handled.

**Model-written orientation**

USCIS distributes policy updates, form revisions, and program announcements affecting immigration and naturalization adjudication.

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a component of the Department of Homeland Security, adjudicates applications and petitions for immigration and naturalization benefits under federal immigration law. The agency processes visa petitions from employers, family members, and individuals; determines employment authorization; adjudicates asylum and refugee claims; processes applications for permanent residence (green cards); conducts naturalization proceedings and citizenship ceremonies; and administers humanitarian programs. USCIS maintains field offices in every state and maintains processing centers for applications and supporting documentation.

USCIS email bulletins communicate updates to immigration policy and procedures that directly affect how applicants are served and cases are adjudicated. Bulletins announce revisions to application forms—such as new versions of visa petition forms or naturalization application forms—and explain the changes and their effective dates. Announcements address filing fees and processing times, communicating fee increases or reductions and revised estimates for case processing. Policy updates cover manual procedures, eligibility criteria, interview requirements, and documentary requirements that immigration attorneys, employers, nonprofit organizations, and individuals need to understand. Program announcements address new initiatives, temporary programs, or pilot projects affecting specific visa categories or immigration benefits.

These bulletins ensure that stakeholders—including immigration attorneys, employers sponsoring workers, nonprofit organizations assisting immigrants, state agencies, and individuals pursuing immigration benefits—understand current procedures, applicable fees and forms, and policy changes. Implementation dates and transition information allow applicants and service providers to plan accordingly. Readers of this digest will see official guidance on how immigration procedures work, what forms and fees apply to different benefit types, and how policies and procedures evolve as the agency administers the immigration system. Content reflects USCIS's role in both routine benefit adjudication and policy-level decisions affecting immigration law implementation.

_Model-written orientation, generated 2026-08-06 by haiku, prompt version 1. It may draw on general knowledge of public institutions and is not official-record content._

## Identity and registry record

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Registry id | `uscis-email` |
| Agency / parent organization | Department of Homeland Security (USCIS) |
| Branch | executive |
| Type | email bulletin |
| Status | active |
| Tier | 2 |
| URL (home) | https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom |
| URL (signup) | https://public.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDHSCIS/subscriber/new |
| Registered | 2026-07-29 |
| Registry notes | Subscribed and confirmed 2026-07-29 (sender [address withheld]). Sibling of the planned uscis-newsroom web entry. Department-level DHS and ICE subscriptions are awaiting email confirmation. Gate-3 coverage evaluation (2026-07-30, from the 2026-07-29 bulletins): 1 bulletin carried 1 update, full text, DKIM-verified, with its canonical uscis.gov URL. The subscription is the agency's own update list covering policy-manual, form, and processing changes — document classes the newsroom page also lists; per-topic subscription scope means the newsroom comparison stays part of coverage accounting as volume accrues. |

## How we ingest it

| Term | Description |
|---|---|
| Channel | email bulletin |
| Method | Subscription bulletins to the project mailbox, ingested by the email adapter (src/fapd/email_sources.py; raw RFC-5322 capture, DKIM verify-and-archive). |
| Adapter | govdelivery |
| Poll cadence | the project mailbox is read about every 15 minutes |
| Requests | none — bulletins are delivered to the project mailbox by the agency's own subscription service |
| Authenticity | every message's DKIM signature is checked on arrival and the result is disclosed on each item; in the inbox a failing signature is labeled, never silently dropped; in the junk folder, which is read too, only a message whose signature verifies and matches the sender's domain is accepted, and the rest are refused and counted |
| Capture and hash | captured raw content is hashed (SHA-256) into the day's committed provenance manifest, hash-chained day to day (PROVENANCE.md) |

## Ingestion health

**quiet** — Most recent item 2026-09-18, 11 days ago (quiet past 7 days).

This label has held since 2026-09-26T04:03:22Z (UTC) and was last re-checked 2026-09-29T10:34:54Z (UTC).

Counts are of our own requests, retries included. A 4xx or 5xx is the server declining to return content — that may be load, maintenance, on-demand generation, or a limit the publisher sets, and we cannot tell which from outside. Nothing here is a measurement of the publisher.

## Ingestion statistics

These figures describe this project's ingestion of this source — items we recorded and requests we made — and nothing else. They are not a measurement of the publisher.

### Last 24 hours

Last 24 hours: no items ingested

### Last 14 days

| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Items ingested | 1 in 14 days (0.07 per day) · most recent 2026-09-18 |
| Content length | 170 characters average, 170 median (shortest 170, longest 170) |
| Delivery mode | email-full — the bulletin carried the full item text |
| Mailbox | no message from this sender in the last 14 days |

Bulletins from this source are delivered to the project mailbox, so there are no requests to report. Its health is read from delivery recency alone.

Most recent item 2026-09-18, 11 days ago (quiet past 7 days).

### All time

Bulletins from this source are delivered to the project mailbox, so there are no requests to report. Its health is read from delivery recency alone.

### Last 30 days, day by day

Each day runs midnight to midnight on Eastern time (Washington, D.C.), the publication day the digests use; the stored request stamps remain UTC.

| Day | Items ingested |
|---|---|
| 2026-08-31 | 3 |
| 2026-09-01 | 0 |
| 2026-09-02 | 0 |
| 2026-09-03 | 0 |
| 2026-09-04 | 1 |
| 2026-09-05 | 3 |
| 2026-09-06 | 0 |
| 2026-09-07 | 0 |
| 2026-09-08 | 0 |
| 2026-09-09 | 2 |
| 2026-09-10 | 0 |
| 2026-09-11 | 1 |
| 2026-09-12 | 0 |
| 2026-09-13 | 0 |
| 2026-09-14 | 0 |
| 2026-09-15 | 0 |
| 2026-09-16 | 0 |
| 2026-09-17 | 0 |
| 2026-09-18 | 1 |
| 2026-09-19 | 0 |
| 2026-09-20 | 0 |
| 2026-09-21 | 0 |
| 2026-09-22 | 0 |
| 2026-09-23 | 0 |
| 2026-09-24 | 0 |
| 2026-09-25 | 0 |
| 2026-09-26 | 0 |
| 2026-09-27 | 0 |
| 2026-09-28 | 0 |
| 2026-09-29 | 0 |

## Our ingestion assessment

**Model-written ingestion assessment**

The USCIS Updates source delivers policy updates via email bulletins to the project mailbox, with content arriving from uscis@messages.dhs.gov. These bulletins carry the full item text and are DKIM-verified and archived. Over the past 14 days, we observed 1 new item, averaging 0.07 items per day. This represents a decrease from the 0.36 items per day reported in the previous assessment. The most recent item was delivered on 2026-09-18, resulting in 8 days since the last delivery and a current "quiet" health status. The single item observed in this period measured 170 characters, while the previous assessment noted items ranging from 170 to 2,789 characters. As an email source, there are no polling requests to report, and the collector recorded no consecutive errors.

_Model-written assessment of our own ingestion, generated 2026-09-26 by gemini-2.5-flash, prompt version 1, trigger: health-change. It restates our measured figures and is not official-record content._