About PetitionLens
PetitionLens helps people preparing an EB-2 National Interest Waiver petition understand how officers decide them, using the officers' own words. It is a free, not-for-profit project.
Why it exists
Most people filing an NIW petition have never read an appeal decision. Those decisions are public, but there are thousands of them and they are hard to search. When a petition is denied, the reasons tend to repeat: an endeavor described too vaguely, support letters that say too little, importance argued for a whole field rather than the specific work. PetitionLens puts those reasons in one place, with the decisions they come from, so you can learn from other people's cases before filing your own.
Data and method
- Decisions. 5,945 non-precedent decisions of the USCIS Administrative Appeals Office on EB-2 appeals and motions, 2012 to 2026, as published by USCIS. They are U.S. government works in the public domain; we claim no rights in them.
- Objection tags. Each decision is matched against a catalog of 22 objection types using text patterns. Every tag keeps the sentence and page it came from, so you can check it. Tags are automated and can be wrong; if you spot one, please tell us.
- Which prongs were met. Read by fixed rules from the appeals office's own sentences only, not from what the Director found or the petitioner argued. Each result keeps its sentence and page. When the office's wording points both ways, the prong is marked unclear and left out of every count rather than guessed.
- Countries. Countries named anywhere in a decision. A name is not a nationality; open a country to read the sentences.
- Similar decisions. Found with a text-embedding model that runs on our own server. No decision text or case data is sent to an AI service.
- Policy Manual. Quotes from the USCIS Policy Manual are verbatim and cite their section. Check the current manual on uscis.gov before relying on them.
- Case tools. The evidence check and the drafts are built from fixed rules and templates, not AI. They report what a profile records; they do not predict outcomes.
What it is not
PetitionLens is not a law firm and does not give legal advice. It is not affiliated with USCIS or any government agency; official forms, filing and case status are only at uscis.gov. The appeals shown were all denied first, so their rates describe denied cases, not anyone's chance of approval. See the full disclaimer.
Who runs it
PetitionLens is built and run by WebOctals (WEBOCTALS LTD), registered in England and Wales, company number 16730955, registered office 54 Dorset Terrace, Leeds, England, LS8 3QR. Questions, corrections and ideas are welcome through the contact page.