What the office replied
- The petition was not handled under the Petitions Act - the office classified it as a request under art. 241 of the Code of Administrative Procedure (KPA).
- Art. 100d: no grounds to ask the Minister to repeal it. The legislator extended it until 4 March 2027; NSA rulings refusing to apply it do not remove it from the law.
- Staff and FAMI funds: FAMI money cannot be freely used for decision-making posts; staffing remains a matter of the office's ongoing work.
- Statistics in the Public Information Bulletin: the department does not keep statistics in that scope and no law obliges it to.
In total, the office found our request unfounded. It also warned that if we repeat it without new circumstances, it may simply uphold its position without notifying us.
We do not consider the matter closed. The reply confirms that nobody measures how long foreigners wait - and what is not measured cannot be improved. We will continue at the level of the Ministry, the Ombudsman and in other voivodeships.
What the documents say
We set each statement of the office against documents we have published ourselves. No commentary - facts only.
The office wrote
The letter "entitled »Petition«" was classified as a request under Article 241 of the Code of Administrative Procedure, "not as a petition".
The documents show
This decision determines the procedure: a petition is handled under the Petitions Act, which provides, among other things, for publishing the petition and the reply on the authority's website. A request under the Code has no such obligation. The reply came after 27 days.
The office wrote
The Foreigners Department "does not keep statistics in the scope you requested", and preparing them "would require first defining a methodology".
The documents show
The Head of the Office for Foreigners wrote to us on 7 September 2026 that voivodeship offices have permanent access to the "Cudzoziemiec" data warehouse and that reports on processing times are "generated automatically on demand" for voivodeship office users. The Mazovian Voivode itself gave us ponaglenie figures "based on data from SI Pobyt". It did not answer our request for printouts of those reports on time - we filed a complaint about inaction with the Voivodeship Administrative Court in Warsaw.
Letters from the Office for Foreigners and the Mazovian Voivode in the archiveThe office wrote
Article 100d "remains a binding provision", and Supreme Administrative Court judgment cited in the petition "did not therefore eliminate Article 100d from the legal order".
The documents show
True - and that is exactly why cases go to court. The Ministry of the Interior wrote to the Commissioner for Human Rights that for the period after 30 June 2024 a court "will refuse to apply this provision and examine the complaint disregarding it". In 2025 the Warsaw Voivodeship Administrative Court received 497 complaints about inaction in residence cases.
Report: The ponaglenie nobody examinesThe office wrote
FAMI money cannot be used for staff who issue decisions; the project "Cudzoziemiec na Mazowszu" is about "increasing the capacity of the Department".
The documents show
The Mazovian Voivode's project from the 2024 call is PLN 39.54 million, of which PLN 29.66 million from FAMI. Its only result indicator is called "brak możliwości usunięcia" ("cannot be removed") with a target value of 0. None of the 138 indicators in the 16 voivodes' projects measures how long a case takes.
Report: FAMI moneyThe office wrote
"Ensuring adequate staffing of the Department remains the subject of the Office's ongoing organisational and budgetary activities".
The documents show
According to the Ministry's table, the average temporary residence procedure in Mazowieckie grew from 153 days in 2023 to 394 days in 2026. 202,187 cases were pending (Office for Foreigners data, 1 July 2026). The law allows 60 days for a decision.
Report: Sixteen offices in numbersThe office found the request "unfounded" and warned that if we repeat it without new circumstances, it may uphold its position "without notifying the applicant". The new circumstances are described in the reports on this site.