DHS Secretary Chertoff indicated in a meeting with AILA and other organizations that USCIS and the FBI are working on changing certain parts of the name check process, which should result in clearing a large portion of the backlog within six months.

The Secretary hopes that in addition to clearing the backlog, applications that have previously been trapped in name check delays will also be cleared more swiftly in future. However, in some cases, checks will be delayed by investigation, but the number of such cases will be a small portion of those delayed in the past.