CaseWhy Hub · Press & research

Press & research

The story in three sentences

Peter Takla spent fifteen years as a solution architect. Then three of his family's naturalization cases passed their interviews, an oath ceremony was scheduled and cancelled, and the cases went silent for months with no explanation anyone could get. CaseWhy is the tool he wished had existed: a free, plain-language explanation of what a USCIS status actually means, what's normal, and what to do when it isn't.

Facts

• What it is: a web app at app.casewhy.com that tracks USCIS cases by receipt number, explains each status in plain language with the USCIS source cited, shows published processing times and the Visa Bulletin, and flags a case that has waited longer than USCIS's published time.
• What's free: tracking up to three cases, status explanations, three AI questions a month, and all reference pages and help directories, with no account needed for the directories and the anonymous question box. No ads, ever.
• What Plus is: $9.99/month, $22.99/quarter, or $66.99/year — more tracked cases, unlimited questions, on-demand checks, a document vault, an attorney-handoff PDF, and escalation-letter drafting.
• Languages: English and Spanish.
• Data: receipt numbers are treated as personal information, encrypted at rest, used only to check status with USCIS and (on Plus) to draft escalation letters; no staff can view them; nothing is sold or shared (see Section 2).
• Company: CaseWhy LLC, St. Petersburg, Florida, founded 2026. No outside funding.
• Status: app.casewhy.com is built and live today. Production USCIS API access is in its final review stage — real case-status lookups will return live results once that access is granted; the free reference pages (processing times, the Visa Bulletin, and the Get Help directories) are fully live regardless.

What we will and won't say

CaseWhy speaks about procedure and published facts — timelines, forms, what a memo says — and cites USCIS, the Federal Register, or the courts for each. It does not give legal advice, does not take positions on immigration policy, does not comment on individual cases, and does not share anything about its users.

Backlog research, sourced

Every figure below is sourced directly from USCIS, the CIS Ombudsman, or the State Department. We're not printing a number here unless we can show exactly where it came from — some of these datasets require a manual pull rather than a simple page fetch, so a few are linked without a figure yet rather than guessed.

• Total pending USCIS caseload — USCIS Immigration & Citizenship Data, quarterly "All Forms" report. Source → (figure pending a data pull from the FY2026 Q3 dataset)
• Median N-400, I-485, and I-765 processing times, nationwide — USCIS Historical National Median Processing Times. Source → (figure pending — this page currently blocks automated access)
• Ombudsman case-assistance requests received — CIS Ombudsman Annual Report. Source →
• Visa Bulletin retrogression events, current fiscal year — State Department Visa Bulletin archive. Source →

Founder

Peter Takla, founder, Florida. Fifteen years as a solution architect in enterprise IT; built CaseWhy after his own family's naturalization cases stalled at the last step.

Contact

press@casewhy.com · Logo pack: see Resources · Boilerplate: see Resources