This backgrounder explains the current process and summarizes those survey results, reflecting the experience of legal advocates with the VAWA interviews that are already conducted at local USCIS offices. The survey results indicate that many local offices are poorly equipped to handle VAWA cases, with advocates often giving low marks on both knowledge of the law and sensitivity to victims. Giving local offices any additional interview or adjudication responsibilities in VAWA cases, as the proposals had suggested, simply did not make sense – for victims, or the system – and defied decades of lessons learned and best practices in the domestic violence field about the critical importance of specialized training.