Case Study: USCIS achieves 24x faster analytics and streamlined immigration application processing with Databricks

Streamlining the path to citizenship with data

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) was overwhelmed by a decade‑long surge in immigration and citizenship applications, with overall case processing times rising sharply. Their on‑premises, legacy stack (Oracle, SAS, Informatica) was brittle and slow, preventing real‑time access for 2,300+ analysts and data scientists and blocking efforts to automate workflows and apply predictive analytics.

By migrating to AWS and Databricks and building a Delta Lake Lakehouse, USCIS federated dozens of data sources, rapidly provisioned large clusters, and moved thousands of tables into a unified platform while enabling collaborative notebooks and ML workflows. The change cut ETL times dramatically (ingesting 120M‑row tables in ~10 minutes vs hours), delivered 24x faster query performance, reduced Tableau dashboard times from ~15 minutes to under 15 seconds, tripled the user base, and unlocked programs like eProcessing, ELIS, fraud detection and forecasting that streamline application processing.

USCIS

Shawn Benjamin

Chief of Data and Business Intelligence