Angelo Paparelli

Along with compliance audits, counsel and due diligence in mergers, acquisitions and corporate restructuring, Paparelli focuses on newly developed problems with sponsored worker immigration issues.

"This is a time of historically unprecedented executive branch opposition to the legal, employment-based process for sponsorship of highly skilled noncitizens and intense immigration-related work site enforcement," he said.

He said it is essential to maintain his clients' confidentiality. "People at this time are concerned about their privacy, due to fears that the government may retaliate against challenges to the immigration system. Sometimes government contractors fear even getting into the controversial immigration realm."

During the last 12 months federal immigration authorities have taken more adverse actions than ever before against employers and the foreign workers they sponsor, while also increasing work site anti-fraud visits, ramping up enforcement of laws that prohibit unauthorized employment and unlawful immigration-related discrimination, Paparelli said.

"Employers nationwide have seen increased immigration agency demands for additional evidence, refusals to extend work visas for existing workers, the revocation of current employees' work visas and denials of employment-based visas and green cards on newly articulated but legally improper grounds."

Developing countermeasures, Paparelli has challenged the fundamental legal authority to engage in workplace investigations of the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate, a unit of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

"Enforcement should not be part of an agency that deals with benefits," he said. "We're seeing draconian enforcement and my point, which I have argued widely, is that investigators should be kept separate from benefits deciders."

In the title of his most recent article on the topic for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, Paparelli blasted the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate as "Less Legitimate Than Inspector Clouseau, but Without the Savoir Faire."

In court, Paparelli has sued the USCIS over its denial of H-1B specialty-occupation worker classification status to the holder of a U.S. MBA degree and a foreign economist degree seeking the position of global marketing manager for a multinational maker of industrial diagnostic equipment and software. The government has not yet answered the complaint.

"We want to give them a last chance at approval," Paparelli said. "The government hopes that most companies will just give up without a fight. When we fight, often the government gives in, because they don't want to risk an adverse precedential ruling."

In March, Paparelli said, "I gave a talk to a packed house of lawyers suing over this issue. It's proliferating. Trump's buy American, hire American executive action in 2017 has been a dog whistle for the agency to introduce new interpretations of eligibility criteria, which brought a hugely higher percentage of denials."

"But I'm like David with his slingshot, and I have pretty good aim."

-- John Roemer