The USCIS offers a Premium Processing Service for those willing to pay $1,410 extra (this may be slightly increasing in the next several months) in regard to certain I-129 and I-140 petitions. This Premium Processing Service is quite useful if you can afford it. If you pay the $1,410 extra filing fee, the USCIS will give you a money back guarantee to process your petition in 15 days. Within that 15 days, they will either approve it, deny it, or issue a request for further evidence. The Request for Evidence, will, of course, delay things until you can provide the remainder of the evidence, but, once you return it to the USCIS, they will then have 15 days to either approve or deny. So, in that case, the 15 days turns into 30 days (plus however long you take to gather and submit the requested additional evidence), but it is still much faster than waiting five to ten months for an approval.
Premium Processing is not available for all services provided by the USCIS. Unfortunately, it is quite limited. It is only available for certain I-129 and I-140 employer-filed petitions. It will cover R-1 petitions, but only if there had previously been a successful USCIS site inspection at the location where the work will be performed. It will not cover Religious Worker Green Card petitions (which are filed on form I-360). Premium processing does not cover family-based immigrant petitions or any naturalization applications.
Important Note: The fifteen-day processing fee only covers the work done by USCIS. If you need to then apply for a visa at an Embassy, that process at the Embassy or Consulate is completely outside of the 15-day guarantee from the USCIS.
Is it worth it? If you qualify for it, and have the money, I have generally strongly recommended getting Premium Processing. The reason is quite simple. The workers at USCIS are under pressure to be picky. And, regardless of how well you document a petition, they can always find a reason to send out a time-consuming Request for Evidence. However, the workers in the Premium Processing division are also under pressure to get these approved in fifteen days. They don’t have time to be picky — to look for potential problems just to demonstrate that they are earning their pay. They don’t want to send out a Request for Evidence unless it is clearly necessary, because that doubles their workload. So the result is that if you pay the extra money for Premium Processing, you not only get a quick answer, but you usually get spared the aggravation of an unnecessary Request for Evidence.
However, lately, like everything else, Premium Processing has been becoming less reliable. I have experienced them improperly rejecting Requests for Premium Processing of many R-1 petitions (this does not deny the petition — it is just that they refuse to do the petition in 15 days). They will say that they do not have a successful site visit, when, in fact they have done a successful site visit. But even when we point that out, they send back the same answer. As far as I can tell, they are probably too busy and this is an easy way to lighten their load because we have no way to force them to admit that they are wrong. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t request Premium Processing, but you should not build your plans around assuming that you will receive it.
I hope this is interesting and helpful. Remember that this is not legal advice. It is just a summary of certain aspects of immigration law which may or may not apply to your situation. I encourage you to consulate an attorney if you think any of this may apply to your situation.
Gunnar Armstrong