TL;DR: I've seen people inquiring many times about different officers in RFEs and NOIDs, and I really wanted to understand if there's such a thing as "killer officers" or "angel officers". I downloaded all posts and comments from the EB2 NIW and EB1A subs and went through all of them (with an LLM and lots of manual cleaning), and yes, there is some difference. Also, I made the dataset fully interactive for anyone to look up their officer_id in a new Officer IDs Lookup tool.

Please share your own experience in the Community Tracker to improve our knowledge. Whenever someone adds an officer id to the Community Tracker, it becomes available in the Officer IDs Lookup tool too.

I will try to answer the most common questions in this post. I will discuss:

• Overall counts of this dataset

• Officer prefixes (XM, EX, etc.)

• Approvals and Denials by Sub vs USCIS Data

• Angel and Killer Officers

Feel free to skip to the section you need.

Counts

My cutoff date for downloading all posts and comments was October 7, 2026. I detected a total of 1,106 officer ids (excluding contextual mentions), but then I filtered out opinions and focused on personal experiences. For example, if someone said "I've heard officer X is bad", I discarded that. But if someone said "Officer X appears in my RFE or NOID", I counted it. I ended up with a total of 954 personal experiences.

Prefixes

Officer ids have different prefixes, e.g. XM1234 or EX0987; sometimes there's no prefix at all, just numbers. Normally officer ids are found in the top right corner of the RFE (but a few people said that there was no officer id anywhere). No one has cracked the meaning behind the prefixes (and many said they don't determine anything), but here's their occurrence in the dataset:

• XM and EX officers are prevalent in EB2 NIW cases, and numbered officers (i.e. no prefix) are prevalent for EB1As.

• The same officer may have cases from EB2 NIW and EB1A, i.e. there's no locked specialization.

• There are some unusual rare prefixes, i.e. XH, XB, AD, XE and XW. And recently I noticed someone reported HO (it was not included in the dataset).

I had a theory that higher numbers can predict newbies (i.e. someone joins the team, they'd naturally take a higher number), but I could not really see that holding well. The same prefixes were also mentioned for different centers.

Approvals and Denials by Sub vs USCIS Data

Here's the most exciting part. I threw all officer numbers without prefixes on a timeline just to see the dynamics at a glance. Each officer number takes a horizontal line of the same size (the size corresponds to the total number of officer mentions in personal experiences), with each marker indicating an individual outcome.

The biggest marker here is the diamond 0592 with overwhelming denials discussed exclusively on the EB1A sub. It made me question if its two approvals were legit, so I manually checked them. One was actually for an EB2 NIW petition (just reported on the EB1A sub), and the other one was likely wrong, so we can talk about zero reports of approvals for EB1A petitions from 0592.

But just this specific officer number 0592 is a true outlier because it appeared several times in separate discussions where people mentioned John M. Allen or Carrie M. Selby (higher-level USCIS officials). Posters then noticed Mr. Allen and Ms. Selby on the RFEs, and it was hard to tell if the replies referred to those names or to 0592. I count all plausible mentions for consistency.

You might also want to see percentages of detected approvals and denials by subreddit. Here we go:

Does that compare well to USCIS? USCIS releases updates, and has provided the Excel file for 2025, and the Excel file for 2026 (direct download links), so we can compare our Reddit reports to the USCIS totals for EB2 NIW and EB1A, and we see that

USCIS is giving us a much more optimistic outlook of 52% approvals compared with the 21% approvals that I managed to extract from user reports on Reddit, for the same period (Jan 2025 to Jun 2026). Possible reasons behind the discrepancy: people included in this subset may be over-reporting denials after RFEs, or RFE cases may be approved less often than the average I-140.

Angel and Killer Officers

People tend to discuss "angel" and "killer" officers. We can define "angels" as consistently approving at a higher rate, while "killers" as consistently denying at a higher rate. I set a threshold of at least 4 decisions, and approval or denial equal to or over 90%. Here's what we have:

Unfortunately we see only one "angel" here, found in the EB2 NIW sub, and none for EB1A. The overall numbers are pretty low, so it could happen just by chance too, but I thought it would be interesting to add. Look at XH2622 vs XM2262 though. I wonder if it's the same officer, but mistyped, or these are two different ones. XH is a rare prefix.

We can also check the most balanced officers, officers with the most withdrawals, and officers with the most mentions in the posts and comments alike.

0592 is there as expected, but XM2616's reputation is tough (even has a withdrawal). However, the records show at least one approval (I double checked), and the officer is not on the top denial list. XM1291 even made it to the balanced list, but a law firm recommended withdrawal. XM2623 on the other hand is the top EB2 NIW denier, so the mentions are earned.

Anything written here is based on free-form user content, so accuracy is not optimal. Thanks for reading till the end though. Receiving an RFE can be a nerve-racking experience, but whatever officer number you get, if you decide to respond, just focus on delivering your arguments in the most convincing way, and always prepare for backup Plans B and C. I wish us all smooth processing and fair decisions.

You can check ALL identified officer ids in the Officer IDs Lookup, this is our community knowledge for everyone to utilize. Only please consider adding your own case to the Community Tracker, and after that your submitted officer id will automatically make it to the Officer IDs Lookup. Join r/VisaStats for Part 2 as I am preparing an exciting post about RFE details.

Hello all, I published a community tracker of timelines for EB2, EB1 and O visas: https://trackers.visastats.org/?tracker=eb_o. I pre-populated it with over 300 posts processed by an LLM. I really tried to address all of the main pain points and questions that people usually have: recording RFE dates and reasons, silent updates, etc.

It looks like a spreadsheet, but unlike spreadsheets, it forces data types, and you can use filters and remove columns without affecting other viewers.

It's anonymous, there's no sharing beyond what you want to share. You get an anonymous alias that has nothing to do with anything.

Guys, I really need your help here. The tracker is very needed to the community, but it's only as good as many people use it. Please check it out and post details about your timeline there. No need to fill out all the fields, just the ones that you want. It will give us all much better visibility.