Congress set a limit of 10,000 U visas that can be granted for principal petitioners each year (this number does not include derivative family members). If the cap is reached, there is a waitlist. Petitioners on the waitlist are granted deferred action, at which point they can apply for work authorization. As of June 2021, there is now a Bona Fide Determination process (BFD), meant to accelerate the rate at which Petitioners can have access to deferred action and work authorization. There are currently no processing times published for the BFD or U visa processes. U visas take a very long time due to the visa cap and there are over 276,000 pending petitions (based on end of the third quarter of the 2021 fiscal year). USCIS intends to publish processing times again in 2022 once there has been sufficient time to track BFD processing.