Angelo A. Paparelli

According to Paparelli, President Donald Trump’s travel ban is much more than it might seem. And taken with the administration’s larger stance on immigrants and foreign labor, the ban has significant implications for companies, their international workforces and their immigration counsel.

“The travel ban version one in particular was something that caught many employers rather flat-footed,” Paparelli said, adding that some companies did not know where their employees were during its implementation in January, underscoring the need for companies to improve how they monitor the location of their international employees.

“This wake-up call resulted in many companies reaching out to their immigration counsel and asking for reports that were never requested before,” Paparelli said.

“Historically, immigration has been an afterthought and it oftentimes is only considered when, for example, a deal closes,” Paparelli said, referring to mergers and acquisitions activity. He added that he is seeing more concern among the top ranks of his corporate clients around the ability to move employees globally, and that immigration and international employees are becoming a more prominent concern for his company clients.

Paparelli pointed to one recent instance he dealt with involving an Italian citizen who is the senior vice president for global strategy of a large multinational hospitality company. Paparelli said he was attempting to enter the U.S. at LAX airport from London to attend a meeting of executives but had traveled to Libya, one of the countries included in Trump’s travel ban executive orders but also singled out under the Obama administration as a country of concern.

Paparelli said the individual was detained at the airport and that the situation arose because of legislation that was enacted in the last budget appropriation under the Obama administration. He added that since the incident took place under the Trump administration, he was unsure how it would play out.

Paparelli said he called a retired former Customs and Border Protection officer and was able to set up a meeting with customs and his client company’s in-house counsel. After Paparelli persuaded the officer that denying entry would be disruptive, his client was admitted.

“That’s a sort of high-stakes [work] that I’d done before but I’d not done it under the Trump administration,” Paparelli said. “We didn’t know if they were going to be so difficult and so unyielding that it would fail.”

— Chase DiFeliciantonio