USCIS's online portal told immigration applicants their cases were approved, denied, or overdue for interviews that never happened, then called it a glitch.

"This is affecting legal immigration to the point where it's almost stopped. You can have a million dollars and get a green card, but if you're trying to process a loved one and you can't, that's just straight up unfair."

— Jesse Miranda, U.S. citizen and son of Mexican immigrants who came legally

The my.uscis.gov portal has been the primary window through which millions of families track their immigration cases. For a person waiting two years for an I-130 petition to clear, logging in and seeing "Approved" is the moment you call your spouse, your parents, the immigration lawyer you have been paying for 18 months. It is the moment you start planning the life you have been denied.

Then on July 23, the government gave that moment to dozens of people, took it back, and called it a glitch.

The errors did not begin with approvals alone. By Wednesday of that week, immigration attorneys and applicants reported a full spectrum of falsehoods cascading through the USCIS online account portal. Some people saw approvals for pending cases. Others saw denial notices for cases that had not yet been decided. Some logged in to find interview notices for appointments scheduled months or years ago, appearing as though they had just been set. A group received alerts saying they had missed interviews that were never scheduled at all.

The variety and breadth of the errors made clear that this was not a minor display bug. This was a system-wide corruption of case status data, affecting multiple case types, multiple stages of processing, and a significant number of accounts.

The portal is the only way most applicants check on their cases. It is not a supplementary tool. It is the primary mechanism for an agency that already operates with wait times of 10 to 20 months on average, and frequently much longer. When that mechanism becomes actively misleading, it does not just inconvenience applicants. It creates legal risk.

Translation: the system that immigration families depend on most was broadcasting lies across a range of case types, and USCIS did not issue a public warning until lawyers noticed.

Jesse Miranda, who has been sponsoring a green card for his wife for nearly a year, logged in on Wednesday and saw her I-130 petition listed as approved. He celebrated briefly, then called the USCIS helpline to confirm. An employee told him his wife's status was unchanged and acknowledged that the agency was aware of the glitch affecting numerous applicants.

"It was heartbreaking," Miranda said. "I get that there's technical stuff behind the scenes, but at the same time, what kind of glitch causes these mass approvals?"

Another American citizen, who asked to be identified only as Kate, was visiting her spouse's country of origin when she saw the erroneous approval. She and her partner had lunch to celebrate being one step closer to living together in the U.S. When she checked the portal again later that day, the usual signifiers of real approval were missing. She had not yet told her spouse the news.

"I don't know how I'm going to tell him. He's going to be devastated."

On Reddit's r/I130Suffering, a community built around the collective misery of the green card process, dozens of people reported the same experience: sudden elation followed by demoralization. On Track My Visa, a Discord server where applicants swap advice, moderators suspended the approval-celebration channel to prevent people from rejoicing over phantom approvals.

The technical cause of the outage was never officially explained by USCIS. The agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment. What is clear is that the my.uscis.gov portal draws from backend case management systems that are known to be decades old. USCIS has publicly acknowledged for years that its infrastructure relies on legacy systems with frequent outages, data corruption, and limited redundancy.

The portal errors appeared during a period when USCIS has been processing fewer cases than in prior years, despite a surge in applications. Wait times for the I-130 alone have stretched well beyond the published averages. Many applicants report no movement on their cases for 12 to 18 months, with no explanations and no recourse.

In that context, a glitch that generates mass false approvals reads less like an innocent software error and more like the system accidentally revealing a hunger for good news that the real bureaucracy cannot deliver.

The portal errors carry real legal consequences beyond emotional distress. Immigration deadlines, response windows, and procedural steps carry mandatory timelines. An applicant who sees a false denial and acts on it may file unnecessary appeals or miss actual deadlines. An applicant who sees a false approval and makes travel plans based on it may find themselves in status violations. An applicant who receives a false missed-interview alert may face automatic case closures.

The JQK law firm, which issues advisories on immigration policy changes, published a detailed warning on the errors, urging applicants not to take any action based on portal information until the system was restored. "In an immigration context where deadlines and procedural steps carry real legal consequences, acting on incorrect information is a serious risk," the firm wrote.

Attorney Xavier de Janon, who represents activists in federal cases, noted that the scale of the errors pointed to a deeper problem. When the government's own system is generating this much misinformation, you have to ask who is responsible when someone loses their case because they trusted what they saw on the screen.

Miranda said the ordeal changed his perspective on immigration policy more broadly. The son of Mexican immigrants who came legally and ultimately received citizenship, he had long considered himself a Republican who believed in strict immigration enforcement. Seeing how difficult the legal process has become, even as the spouse of a U.S. citizen, he has reconsidered.

"I always thought they're just going after illegals," he said. "But this is affecting legal immigration to the point where it's almost stopped."

The Trump administration has promoted the $1 million Trump Card program as a path to residency, while the infrastructure that processes family-based petitions, the backbone of U.S. immigration for decades, runs on legacy systems that routinely corrupt their own data. The administration has also proposed requiring social media account disclosures from citizenship applicants and expanded surveillance of legal immigration channels, all while the basic mechanism for tracking a case cannot be trusted to display accurate information.

The USCIS portal showed thousands of people exactly what they wanted to see, then showed them exactly what the government has always been: a machine that tells you your case is moving, while standing perfectly still.