If you are applying for a 🇺🇸US visa you might find yourself constantly checking the USCIS website for updates - which can be quite nerve-wracking. I searched for USCIS scrapers that could automatically notify me of any changes, but the ones I came across were outdated and no longer functional (at least didn’t work for me). I decided to give it a try with Selenium, GitHub Actions and SendGrid and ended up with a script that checks my status and sends me an email if anything changes (and writes in a .csv file the status every time it runs - not really sure how that would be useful but I wanted to keep a log it). On current settings it runs once every hour.
Main script is check_status.py. It uses Selenium to check on the USCIS website, look for the case number and identify case status and description.
It reads the last entry in the status_check.csv file. If the case status has changed, it sends an email notifying about the change.
Every time it runs it writes the data to a status_check.csv file.
Remember to replace the following variables with the correct information inside GitHub Secrets.
- CASE_NUMBER: your USCIS case number
- FROM_EMAIL: the email you are sending from (must be authenticated on SendGrid)
- TO_EMAIL: the email you are sending to
- SENDGRID_API_KEY: your SendGrid API Key. For more info on how to send emails from Python with SendGrid there's this short and easy video.
Marco Dalla Stella md3934@columbia.edu