How do I programmatically check my application status on USCIS? - api

Question

Every day, I need to check my visa application status on the USCIS website (https://egov.uscis.gov/casestatus/landing.do). Since manually doing it gets cumbersome, I created automation in UIPath to run every few hours and email me if the status changed. However, it still needs to open the browser, navigate to the page, read the result, etc.
Is there a better way of going about this?
I tried finding if USCIS has any API that I could programmatically call, but there doesn't seem to be any. I looked at the page and found that the text box for the receipt number has the following HTML:
<input id="receipt_number" name="appReceiptNum" type="text" class="form-control textbox" maxlength="13"/>
So, from Postman, I tried firing a GET request:
GET https://egov.uscis.gov/casestatus/landing.do?receipt_number=XXXXXXXX
where XXXXXXXX would be my actual application number. But this didn't work and it just returned the main page. I tried switching it to a POST, but that didn't work either and returned the same result. On further inspection, I realized that the actual result page has a different URL, so I tried GET and POST both, on the result URL:
GET https://egov.uscis.gov/casestatus/mycasestatus.do?receipt_number=XXXXXXXX
This gets me a page telling me that there were validation errors and they didn't recognize.
Went back to the manual process to see if I was missing anything. The result page URL has a format
https://egov.uscis.gov/casestatus/mycasestatus.do?JSESSIONID=ZZZZZZZZZ
where ZZZZZZZZZ is the value of JSESSIONID cookie set during the landing page. So I changed my process to:
Send a GET request to the landing page (https://egov.uscis.gov/casestatus/landing.do)
Copy the value of JSESSIONID cookie from the response and set that as a query parameter in the request to the result page (https://egov.uscis.gov/casestatus/mycasestatus.do), while sending receipt_number as the payload in a POST request
This isn't working either. My end goal was to write a Python or Java code (since those are the two I am familiar with) to get me the result, but I guess if I can't get my manual requests working from Postman, getting it to work from code is a pipe dream.

Answer 1

You don't need the session tag, just change the param name in your postman request to appReceiptNum and it will work: https://egov.uscis.gov/casestatus/mycasestatus.do?appReceiptNum=LINXXXXXXXXXX

Answer 2

#Alok
What you require is term "headless browser / scraper"
just created a quick sample ( but in node.js)
const today = formatYmd(new Date())
const browser = await puppeteer.launch()
const page = await browser.newPage()
console.log("going to URL")
await page.goto(url)
await page.$eval('#receipt_number', (el,receipt) => el.value = `${receipt}`, process.env.RECEIPT_NUMBER)
await page.click('input[type="submit"]')
console.log("waiting for submission to be completed.")
await page.waitForSelector('div.current-status-sec').catch(t => console.log("Not able to load status screen"))
const status = removeTags(await page.$eval('.current-status-sec', el => el.innerText))
console.log(`${today}: ${status}`)
await page.screenshot({path: `./screenshot/${today}_screenshot.png`})
browser.close()
You can find the full repo here.
https://github.com/Parthashah/uscis-status-check
The code will provide back screenshot and status

Answer 3

I just created a simple USCIS web crawler scraper Spring Boot app using HtmlUnit.
The only thing is my crawler ignores the wrong case number. But is working. The github link is here: https://github.com/somych1/USCISCaseStatusWebScraper
public ResponseDTO getStatus(String caseId){
ResponseDTO responseDTO = new ResponseDTO();
//browser setup
WebClient webClient = new WebClient(BrowserVersion.CHROME);
webClient.getOptions().setUseInsecureSSL(true);
webClient.getOptions().setRedirectEnabled(true);
webClient.getOptions().setJavaScriptEnabled(false);
webClient.getOptions().setCssEnabled(false);
webClient.getOptions().setThrowExceptionOnScriptError(false);
webClient.getOptions().setThrowExceptionOnFailingStatusCode(false);
webClient.getCookieManager().setCookiesEnabled(false);
webClient.getOptions().setTimeout(8000);
webClient.getOptions().setDownloadImages(false);
webClient.getOptions().setGeolocationEnabled(false);
webClient.getOptions().setAppletEnabled(false);
try{
// loading the HTML to a Document Object
HtmlPage page = webClient.getPage(url);
// case lookup
HtmlInput input = page.getHtmlElementById("receipt_number");
input.setValueAttribute(caseId);
HtmlInput button = page.getElementByName("initCaseSearch");
HtmlPage pageAfterClick = button.click();
// new page after click
HtmlHeading1 h1 = pageAfterClick.getFirstByXPath("//div/h1");
HtmlParagraph paragraph = pageAfterClick.getFirstByXPath("//div/p");
//setting response object
responseDTO.setCaseId(caseId);
responseDTO.setStatus(status);
responseDTO.setDescription(description);
} catch (IOException ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
}
return responseDTO;
}