How we source data

Confidence labels

• ◆OfficialFrom a statute, regulation, USCIS/State Department page, or official data.
• ◈High confidenceSeveral authoritative sources agree.
• ●Public case dataA verified public case timeline.
• ○Community reportedReported by users or forums; not independently verified.
• ◇InterpretationWELIVEINUSA's plain-language explanation. Not a rule.

Where each dataset comes from

• USCIS official statistics (I-140 and others) ◆Official

  Checked daily; a new file is downloaded, stored raw, then parsed.

• Visa Bulletin ◆Official

  The State Department site refuses automated clients. Recent months come from USCIS's copy of the designated chart; history comes from Internet Archive captures of the original DOS pages; pages can also be imported by hand.

• Processing times ◆Official

  USCIS's processing-times site refuses automated clients, so for the current figure we link to it. We also record the median processing time printed in USCIS's quarterly all-forms report (from FY2021 Q4), labeled as a median, never compared with the site's figure, and never estimated.

• AAO decisions ◆Official

  Public decision PDFs downloaded at the robots.txt pace, tagged by rule, spot-checked by hand.

• Federal Register and USCIS news ◆Official

  Daily via official API and feeds; keyword-classified; a summary appears only after the review described below.

What we won't publish

• A community number presented as a USCIS approval rate.
• An “officer approval rate” without a sample that supports it.
• Any promise of an outcome, or a prediction for an individual case.
• A change to a legal requirement that rests on a single AI reading.
• Names, A-numbers, full receipt numbers, addresses, passport data, phone numbers or emails.

How updates are reviewed

When an official source changes, one AI model reads the official document, decides whether our pages need to change, and drafts the change with its sources. An AI model from a different company then checks that reading against the same document. We change a page only when both agree; when they disagree, a person at WELIVEINUSA decides. Every changed fact keeps its source link and verification date.

How we collect

Our collectors identify themselves, follow robots.txt and crawl delays (USCIS asks for one request every 10 seconds), keep every raw file, and are append-only — historical statistics are never overwritten. When a source refuses automated access we record it and fall back to manual import; we never try to get around it.