USCIS built a service center for humanitarian cases. The backlog moved in with it.
On March 30, 2023 USCIS opened the Humanitarian, Adjustment, Removing Conditions and Travel Documents Service Center — HART — the sixth service center in its Service Center Operations directorate and the first dedicated to humanitarian workloads. Four case types that had been scattered across other centers were consolidated there. If your VAWA self-petition, U visa bona fide determination, refugee or asylee relative petition, or spousal reentry-bar waiver has gone quiet, HART is almost certainly where it is sitting — and where it is sitting turns out to matter more than practitioners expect.
USCIS adjudicates most petitions through Service Center Operations, or SCOPS. Until 2023 that meant five centers — California, Nebraska, Potomac, Texas and Vermont — each handling a mixed portfolio. Humanitarian filings were spread among them, competing for officer time against far higher-volume employment and family workloads.
HART was the response. It is the sixth SCOPS center and the first built around a single category of work, staffed by officers trained specifically on it. USCIS onboarded 379 employees in its first fiscal year, exceeding its own staffing target. The premise was that specialised adjudicators, insulated from unrelated queues, would move these cases faster.
VAWA self-petitions on Form I-360 · bona fide determinations on Form I-918 U visa petitions · Form I-730 Refugee/Asylee Relative Petitions · and applications for waivers of reentry bars filed by immigrant spouses of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents. USCIS said at the time that it would identify further workloads once the centre was fully staffed, so this list is a floor rather than a ceiling.
One consequence is administrative rather than legal, and it confuses people constantly: the centre that receives a filing is not necessarily the one that adjudicates it. An I-730, for example, is filed with the Texas Service Center under the agency’s own instructions and then processed by HART. A receipt notice bearing one centre’s code tells you very little about where the file actually lives.
HART operates with virtual adjudication capability and coordinates with the existing centres rather than functioning as a single building full of files. For an applicant that is invisible. For a delay suit it is not, because two questions in every such case — whom to sue and where to file — assume the file is somewhere.
An asylee filed an I-730 for her husband, who was subject to an unexecuted removal order. After roughly six months without a decision they sued in the District of Columbia to compel adjudication, naming the Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security and HART’s Acting Director. Venue in D.D.C. was proper, because two of the three defendants reside there in their official capacities. But the parties could not agree where the petition was actually pending: the plaintiffs said the virtual HART Service Center, the government said the USCIS field office in Las Vegas. The court transferred the case to the District of Nevada under 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a), reasoning that in APA cases the claim arises where the decisionmaking occurs — and that on either account, that was not the District of Columbia. The plaintiffs, who lived in Las Vegas, had not opposed transfer.
The lesson is not that D.D.C. is unavailable. It is that naming Washington-based officials establishes venue without establishing convenience, and a HART case filed far from the applicant’s home invites a transfer motion the plaintiff will usually lose. Where the applicant resides is both the easiest venue to defend and, under § 1391(e)(1)(C), independently available. The venue and transfer page covers the analysis in full.
Consolidation did not dissolve the backlog; it relocated it. What it did do is make the delay harder for the government to justify, because the usual explanation is no longer available.
A HART delay complaint should name the HART Service Center director alongside the Director of USCIS and the Secretary of Homeland Security, and should ordinarily be filed in the district where the applicant resides. Do not assume the receipt-notice service centre is the adjudicating office, and do not assume a virtual centre gives you a Washington forum.
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I-730 following-to-join petitions are a founding HART workload.
VAWA I-360 self-petitions moved to HART when it opened.
I-601A provisional waiver practice overlaps HART’s spousal reentry-bar waiver workload.
FOIA requests can produce the underlying refugee/asylum file.