Client Alert!
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is announcing the opening of the Humanitarian, Adjustment, Removing Conditions, and Travel Documents (HART) Service Center, the sixth service center within its Service Center Operations (SCOPS) directorate, and the first to focus on humanitarian and other workload cases.
HART will promote cohesive and consistent adjudicative operations, and its dedicated workforce will improve the quality and efficiency of our humanitarian caseload processing. This workforce will continue to receive the robust, specialized training currently provided to employees who are processing these forms. These applications and benefits affect the most vulnerable of noncitizens, and the opening of this service center will make a positive impact in the quality, timeliness, and scale of our humanitarian processing abilities.
After a review of USCIS processing times, we deemed that the greater focus should be provided to these humanitarian-based benefits, which led to the creation of the HART Service Center. With HART, we are taking action to improve our service in partnership with community groups. In fact, the creation of HART is partially the result of the feedback we have received from our partnership with stakeholders and community groups.
HART will initially exist as a hybrid service center, with virtual adjudication capabilities and coordination with existing service centers for certain administrative support. HART will ultimately transition to a 100% virtual service center with no geographic physical location, across multiple time zones. This center will be identified by the specialized work adjudicated by its staff and not by a brick-and-mortar facility or location.
HART will process both digital and paper-based applications and petitions and will partner with existing service centers to support physical onsite necessities such as file exchange and administrative support.
The HART Service Center will initially focus on the following case types:
•Form I-601A, Application for Provisional Unlawful Presence Waiver;
•Bona Fide Determination (BFD) for Form I-918, Petition for U Nonimmigrant Status;
•Form I-730, Refugee/Asylee Relative Petition; and
•VAWA-based Form I-360, Petition for Amerasian, Widow(er), or Special Immigrant.
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