Who is immigration lawyer Sharon Powell?

Learn more about Powell Law by visiting our website, Facebook, Instagram, or checking out the interview our attorney Sharon did on 92.3FM/107.9FM The Tide.

If you missed hearing Sharon on air, you can still listen to the full interview below or read the transcript in this post!

A: Hey everyone, I am Andy, and in the studio with me right now is Sharon Powell, an immigration attorney from Powell Law. Sharon, how are you doing today? 

S: I am doing well, thanks so much for having me in today. 

A: Yeah, I’m really glad you’re able to join me. So, let’s talk about your practice. First, where are you located, and how long have you been here? 

S: I am located in Williamsburg, Virginia, right across from the Olde Towne Medical Center. I’ve been in this area for nearly seven years. 

A: And where did you go to law school, do you want to dive into that sort of thing? 

S: Sure! I’m actually a midwestern girl. I went to both undergrad and law school in first Iowa, then Minnesota. I was initially and still am barred in Minnesota and am now also barred in the state of Virginia and admitted to Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. 

Cool! You of course practice immigration law, so, when and why should someone hire an immigration lawyer? What situations can an immigration lawyer like yourself and your expertise come in handy? 

There are a lot of reasons to hire an immigration lawyer. First, I think it’s important to understand that there are a number of different ways that immigration comes into play in somebody’s life. My firm primarily works within the family-based immigration world.  

If you think about immigration, there’s really sort of three buckets that you can talk about immigration, one is family-based- you meet someone abroad and you want to get married and get them a Green Card. That’s primarily the area that we work in. Then there is employment-based immigration. You hear about H1Bs, the West Coast, especially the San Francisco Bay Area, they’ll be doing a lot of those specialty work visas. And then you have the deportation bucket where people are fighting their way through immigration court.  

In my practice, I think it would make sense to consider hiring an immigration lawyer even if you’re going through something as what would seem as simple as a Green Card, a marriage-based Green Card. The reason I would say that is because the laws and policies have been so drastically affected by our administrations in the last few years that even in the last four years, we had nearly 1,000 policy changes just for immigration alone. 

That’s making my head spin. 

Yeah. I have a lot of clients who will come to me and say, “Oh I was looking online,” or “Oh my friend did this a couple years ago.” And my response is always, “What a Green Card looked like two years ago is not what a Green Card looks like today.” So even having a consultation with an immigration attorney who has been tracking these changes is really helpful in making sure that you’ve got your feet pointed in the right direction. 

How can something like a legal issue, maybe say a pending divorce from another country, carry over from another country to the United States? 

Everything in an immigration case is impacted by all of the circles that come out from your life. If you were married in another country and you’re seeking a divorce in that country, although that divorce will be given credibility here in the United States, you want to make sure that every step has been taken properly in that other country. If not — and I actually have a case where a client thought he was divorced in his home country, got married to his current wife now, went through the Green Card process, and found out through immigration that his divorce in his home country wasn’t valid — so now we’re having to reinvent the wheel for his entire case.  

I have clients, for example, who will say, “What if I got pulled over in my home country?” You want to make sure that you do actually know what happened. A traffic citation is not going to affect your Green Card, but you do want to make sure that when you’re talking to an immigration lawyeryou don’t separate what happened in your life in your home country and what is happening now in the United States because immigration takes everything into account in your case. 

And speaking of talking to an immigration lawyer, what should one of your prospective clients do, how should they prepare when they come and talk to you? How should they best set themselves up for getting the most out of your services? 

I think it’s important to have documents available [like] your passport, your visa, [and] to think through every time you may have applied for a visa. For example, when I have someone come into my office, in their own past they may have applied for a student visa abroad, they may have entered on a visitor visa, maybe they came in on an exchange visa and they don’t know if they are required to go home for two years before they come back to the States.  

Having access to all of your documents and even having a timeline in your mind of all the different times you have encountered U.S. Immigration- which could be Customs and Border Patrol, could be an embassy, could be a USCIS officer. I’m throwing out a lot of acronyms, but just making sure that in your mind you have a really good timeline of all the events that have occurred. 

Within the broader law practice and community, how much of a specialty is immigration law, and is it something that is widely practiced or is it much more of a narrow, specific expertise? 

Immigration law is very unique. It has very few overlaps with other areas of law. What I would say is, if someone is in need of an immigration lawyer, to look for a law firm that exclusively practices immigration law or a law firm that clearly does immigration and criminal law, because the intersection of criminal law and immigration is very unique as well.  

Our law firm for example, the only thing that we do is family-based immigration law. Now we are [also] starting to break into federal district court where we are taking on the government itself and suing on behalf of our clients when their case is delayed. We are one of three immigration law firms that I am aware of in Williamsburg, and we are one of the only full-time open immigration law firms. 

Sharon, we have to take a real quick break. But do me a favor and stick around because immigration and visas have been in the news quite a lot in recent years and I would love to talk to you about that. Listeners, stick around because I’ve got more with Sharon Powell of Powell Immigration Law coming up after this quick break. 

Welcome back to the morning drive. I’m Andy and I’m still in the studio with Sharon Powell of Powell Immigration Law. Before the break Sharon and were catching up about all the different immigration-related legal services that she provides. Now Sharon, let’s talk a little bit about your clients. What sort of demographics do you find yourself working with? 

One of the really exciting benefits of the type of work that we do is that our work cuts across almost every demographic of America. We work with military families who have met a spouse abroad, or maybe have adopted a child abroad and are trying to either bring their family here or to keep their family here. We work with undocumented people, we work with unaccompanied minors (children who don’t have family in the United States), we work with international students. I have worked with former Olympians who are now being hired by an American athletic facility and [are] going to be training future American athletes.  

We really work with everyone from [those] at the peak of their ability to people who have really hit the bottom of the barrel. A lot of our clients have been victims of domestic violence. One of the areas that we are branching into now is victims of human trafficking, which I think people would be surprised how much of that occurs in Williamsburg.  

We have worked with children as young as two years old, up to somebody in her 80s who is applying for U.S. citizenship. It’s fun and it’s exciting for us in our office to be able to interact with so many people. I would also like to add that we have proudly represented people from (I believe it is now) 76 countries. 

Do you work with undocumented immigrants? How are you able to serve them, and are there any misconceptions that they might have before they come to you? 

I do work with undocumented immigrants. I would say that a primary question would be, “If I go speak to an immigration lawyer, am I at risk of being turned over to ICE?” And to that I would say, frankly I would lose my license if I turned someone over to ICE after having met with them. 

The example that I give is, for anybody who runs into issues with the law — let’s say you are accused of a crime, whether or not you have committed that crime — you have a right to representation and to have a lawyer take your side. So if you went to a lawyer and said, “I may or may not have committed a crime,” and the lawyer says, “Well now I’m reporting you to the police,” that lawyer would probably never have clients ever again.  

I think what people need to understand is [that] my job is to advocate for my clients, make sure that we are finding a path forward that they may legally access, and preserve their confidentiality at all costs. 

Do you ever bump into any issues where, maybe in your advocacy for your clients, there are some people who might have some misconceptions of their own, or might not be as welcoming as you might like for people coming to this country? 

One of the main misconceptions that I hear again and again is that immigrants, documented or undocumented, increase the crime level in a town. To that I would say- in fact, a lot of the work that I end up doing is advocating for my clients who have been victims of crime, in large part because I think people assume that they will not report to the police.  

One of the things that I believe that my law firm does, and what a lot of immigration lawyers do, is to make their communities more stable, more vibrant, and frankly, more safe. Because if I have a client who comes to me and has been a victim of a crime, if I can help them make that report to the police, then the police may have facts to investigate and to prosecute. And so that is a misconception that I do hear from a number of people who may not have a lot encounters with immigrants. 

We’ve all seen the footage of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last year. Of course, many Afghanis were fleeing from the advance of the Taliban and many of them have since sought refuge in the United States. Has Powell Law worked with many Afghanis in recent months? 

We have, and it has been very disappointing. What happened in August when the United States withdrew from Afghanistan is that of course, a lot of people who had supported the U.S. military, a lot of Afghans who had supported the U.S. military, were left behind. What we were told as immigration practitioners, and what I will say from the very beginning, is that it was really immigration lawyers who were on the ground scrambling to try to figure out how to get people out of Afghanistan. And it has been a very disappointing outcome.  

There is one type of visa that is available to Afghans who directly served the U.S. military. It’s called a Special Immigrant Visa. There are a number of requirements that have to be met in order for an Afghan to obtain that visa. Frankly, the first few people who entered the United States at the end of July/beginning of August on these SIVs, these Special Immigrant Visas, their cases had already been in process for a couple of years. It just so happened for them that they were lucky enough to get out on some of the first flights. I drove up to Fort Lee in August to assist some of these Afghans who had entered the United States on their SIVs in applying for their Green Cards, and they were really some of the lucky few.  

Since then, I have had family members who are either Green Card holders or U.S. citizens come to me and say, “My family has been left behind in Afghanistan,” and “How can I get them out?” What we had been told was that we could access a pathway called Humanitarian Parole, whereby the family member would apply for Humanitarian Parole on behalf of their family members left behind, and after going through a very long and convoluted process (and frankly a very very expensive process), maybe they could get their families into the United States.  

By the first of September, USCIS had received close to 20,000 humanitarian parole applications, had raked in over $9 million, and by November had not adjudicated any of them.  

I have filed a handful of these. We filed them in probably late August. USCIS took the money and they have done nothing for my clients. I have no updates to give. And that seems to have been the response of our immigration system.  

Albeit my understanding is that they have six officers working with these 20,000 applications. Understandably, it is overwhelming for our government. At the same time, [with] the amount of money that the government was able to pull in (it is $575 per family member to do the first step of the process), that first step has not been approved or denied. It has been a very disappointing experience for me, and I think devastating for my clients who have come to me, such that when Afghans call my office now, I don’t have a good answer for them. 

Is it just merely a waiting game when it comes to things being sorted out at the federal level, or-? 

I don’t think so. What I’ve been hearing from a lot of my colleagues who have received some responses is that they’re receiving denials. The other challenging factor is that the U.S. embassy has been evacuated in Afghanistan, so for people who are stranded in Afghanistan, even if they were to receive a Humanitarian Parole visa, for access to it, they have to somehow safely leave Afghanistan to a bordering country to go to another embassy in order to access this visa. So it has really not been well-orchestrated by our government, and I do think that many of our Afghan allies simply feel abandoned. 

Is this maybe the most difficult challenge you feel like you and your industry as a whole have faced in your career? 

No. I would say that for those of my colleagues who have been on the front lines trying to fight for their client’s right to have a fair asylum hearing. Asylum was really dismantled and shaken and really torn down by our previous administration. I also think that the word asylum was dragged through the mud, so that there is a sense that asylum is simply a loophole that people can cross the border and try to claim, when in actual fact, the standard of asylum is incredibly high. It is a very hard and high standard to meet. And for those of my colleagues who really stayed the course during the previous administration trying to fight for their clients’ rights to plea a well-founded fear of persecution, I believe that that was equally devastating for them and their clients. 

I would imagine that’s difficult. Before I let you go, what is the best way for prospective clients to contact you? Email, or phone number, can you provide that for me? 

Yep! The best way to contact us is at our phone number. That’s 757-775-8526. We have staff who are fluent in Spanish, and you can also go to our website, which is powellimmigration.com. 

There you have it! That’s Sharon Powell from Powell Immigration Law. Sharon, thanks for stopping by, and hope to catch up with you soon!