"I keep a box of Kleenex in my office," Tammy Fox says. "I used to go through a box in about three months. I now go through sometimes a box a day, or a box a week."

She is not describing burnout. She is describing what walks through her door.

Tammy has practiced immigration law in Miami for more than 40 years. She has been a federal prosecutor, a removal defense specialist, a business immigration partner, and a co-founder of Exodus Migration, a firm that helps people secure residency and citizenship outside the United States. She has written the questions on the Florida Bar's immigration specialist exam. She represents famous musicians and multimillion-dollar investors.

And she says she has never seen a year like this one.

"This is the first time where I've seen an administration aggressively punishing people who are lawfully here," she says. "In the 40 years I've practiced, I've not seen this."

How Tammy Entered Immigration Law: A Clerkship, a Landmark Case, and a Weak Job Market

Fox did not set out to become an immigration lawyer. She set out to clerk for a federal judge.

While at the University of Miami School of Law, she landed a clerkship with Judge Eugene Spellman. Spellman happened to be presiding over Louis v. Nelson, the landmark case that marked the first time Haitians arriving in the United States were detained. The courtroom was a collision of worlds. On one side sat senior government attorneys, including the Attorney General Rudy Giuliani. On the other sat Fox's own law professors, among them Ira Kurzban, representing the Haitians.

"I remember one time when Judge Spellman raked Ira Kurzban over the coals for sitting on the table in his courtroom," she recalls. "And this is my law professor. I was like, whoa, a law professor is getting yelled at. Instead of him yelling at me, this judge is yelling at him."

Maurice Inman, then general counsel of immigration, asked if she would come work for the government after graduation. It was 1983. The job market was weak, her boyfriend, who would later become her husband, was chasing big-firm offers, and Fox considered herself an idealist.

"I thought, I'm going to take the purist road," she says. "If I go to government, I'm not going to have the politics of a big firm and all the other stuff that goes with it. And they sold me a bill of goods too. They said, you're going to be deporting all these evil people. Which I learned wasn't true when I went to work for the government."

She entered through the honors program as a top student. She went on to become the government's lead Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Florida, filing roughly 5,000 Mariel boatlift complaints as the statute of limitations ran down.

Building a Miami Immigration Practice: From Removal Defense to Business Immigration

When Fox left the government, her comfort zone was enforcement. "I came from a prosecutor's background," she says. She partnered with Alcee Lomangino, whom she describes as "a very astute enforcement-based immigration lawyer."

"We were a force to be reckoned with," Fox says. "The work we did literally was just phenomenal."

Her next chapter came with Michael Bander, a business immigration lawyer she worked alongside for 11 or 12 years. "He taught me the business world," she says. Both mentors have since passed away, a fact Fox notes with characteristic dark humor: "Maybe there's a theme here. Don't work with me, you pass away. But they pass away after I leave them. So as long as I'm with you, you get to live."

When Bander began looking for a way out, Fox joined Larry Rifkin, a friend with a similar business-focused practice. That partnership, Rifkin & Fox-Isicoff, is now 25 years old. Over those years, her caseload shifted almost entirely from removal to business immigration, with a heavy dose of federal court work in between.

Then the two worlds she had spent four decades keeping separate crashed into each other.

"Business and Enforcement Have Intersected": Tammy Fox on the New Reality for Immigration Attorneys

Fox served on the Florida Bar's certification committee and wrote the exam questions that determine whether an attorney can call themselves a board-certified immigration specialist. The pass rate, she admits, was "exceedingly low." The committee's fix revealed a structural truth about the profession.

"We realized there are business practitioners on this side and there are enforcement practitioners on this side," she says. The committee restructured the exam so candidates could choose whether to answer more family-based, business-based, or removal questions. "The two areas really didn't intersect."

That is no longer true.

"If you are a practitioner in the business world who doesn't do removal, you're in trouble," Fox says. "And if you're a removal practitioner who doesn't do business immigration, you're also limited in the options you can offer your client."

The Berklee Musician Who Won an Emmy and Landed in Removal Proceedings

Fox is a piano player. Her husband was a professional musician when she married him. She represents a lot of famous musicians, so when a client arrived with a full scholarship to a master's program at Berklee College of Music, she knew what that meant. "You don't get a full scholarship at Berklee unless you're really good," she says.

He secured an O-1B visa as a musician. When he applied to extend it, he had added a new credential: he was a contributor on an album that won an Emmy. It was a collaborator Emmy rather than a main award, which meant he was recognized but not listed on the website.

USCIS denied the extension, calling the award "dubious." He was applying for residence through his wife. When that petition was filed, it was denied because the O-1B had been denied. He was placed in removal proceedings.

"So now he's in removal proceedings fighting for his life because his O1B was denied," Fox says.

When Doing Everything Right Is Not Enough

The musician is not an outlier in Fox's caseload. She describes a B-2 extension denial that led to proceedings. Clients who were lawfully paroled into the country and then placed in removal when their parole was terminated. An H-1B professional with a pending extension, fully authorized to remain and work, who was taken into custody while traveling for business.

Most alarming to her are clients who were granted withholding of removal after proving they would be persecuted in their home country. "What are they doing? They're removing them to Sudan or these third countries that they have no connection to, where they're being incarcerated," she says. One such client was from Belarus. "That person was never in danger of being removed to some godforsaken country that she didn't have any connections to. Now they're picking those people up at home, taking them into custody, even though they have four or five US citizen children."

She adds that this is not limited to the poor or the undocumented. "One of my clients happens to be married to a man who makes $3 million a year in big law. The world doesn't stop for people who are rich either."

The consequence is a change in how Fox counsels every client, starting with the first consultation. When someone lawfully present asks to file for asylum, her first move is to slow them down.

"Let's explore other alternatives," she tells them. "Do you have a job offer? Can you be a professional worker? Will somebody sponsor you for residence? Do you have any family? Is there any possibility you are a US citizen? Is there any way we can make you legal through a nonimmigrant visa or residence based on anything else before you file for asylum?"

Her reasoning is blunt. "Asylum is so dicey and being taken into custody these days is so prevalent, and the custodial situation is more akin to a concentration camp than it is a federal jail. These detention settings are horrific."

EB-5 Source of Funds Scrutiny: Why Tammy Fox Now Works With a Forensic Accountant

The enforcement mindset has reached the investor visa world too. Fox handles a significant EB-5 caseload, and she says the scrutiny on source and path of funds has become "absolutely insane."

The issue is what the government calls commingling. Most EB-5 investors are in their 40s, 50s, or 60s. They have worked for 30 or 40 years. The seven years of tax returns and bank statements they are required to submit reflect not just recent earnings but decades of accumulated savings in investment and retirement accounts.

"So now this administration is saying, oh, but you took a million dollars that you made out of this investment account. You can show us that a million dollars you earned legally, but we don't know what million dollars you took out of your investment account," she explains.

In one recent case, the government asked for proof of money earned in 1995. The client had taken a $10,000 loan that year to open a small restaurant abroad, which grew into a multimillion-dollar grocery consortium. "They wanted the bank loan from 1995 for $10,000," Fox says. "No one has that."

Her response has been to stop doing what she is not trained to do. "I used to always think that these are laypeople doing these, and I'm a layperson, so if I can understand this, they should understand this," she says. "Now I work with a forensic accountant. I don't bother to do that anymore because I'm not a forensic accountant."

She also flags a provision of the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act that allows EB-5 residents to be denied in the national interest without judicial review. She points to Chinese nationals employed by Huawei being denied on that basis. Many, she says, are now looking for residency or citizenship elsewhere.

Why Tammy Fox Files FOIA Requests Before Filing Anything

One of Fox's most practical shifts in practice comes from a simple observation: the government is now comparing everything an applicant has ever submitted.

She compares it to the intake questionnaire at a doctor's office. "They ask you these questions and I'm thinking, none of their business. I'm going to answer no to that," she says. "And I think, these are my clients when they're applying for a visa." Half of them never even fill out their own applications. Someone in their company does. Years later, a work history that omits a job or inflates a title collides with a green card petition that claims something different.

So Fox now requires every client to hand over a copy of every document they have ever submitted to the Department of State or immigration authorities. If they do not have them, she files Freedom of Information Act requests with the Department of State, ICE, Border Patrol, and USCIS.

"I won't submit anything now without getting everything I have on the client," she says. "Because clients don't remember, or they remember an error, and it can result in a really bad outcome for them."

She has seen the same machinery aimed at H-1B specialty occupation determinations. Fox represents a health-focused AI company that filed an H-1B for a physician to serve as a clinical director, working with hospitals and doctors on the responsible use of AI in diagnosis and prognosis. The response was what she calls a "vicious" Request for Evidence asking why the role required a doctor at all.

"Who better to know?" she asks.

Exodus Migration: Tammy Fox on the Rise of Second Citizenship and Residency by Investment

"I always say that immigration lawyers, we know when a country's going bad long before anyone else does," Fox says. "Because we start to get people from those countries inquiring about what it would take to get a visa."

Lately, the inquiries have been coming from inside the United States.

Fox co-founded Exodus Migration with Ron Klasko, who sits on the board of the Investment Migration Council. The firm helps clients obtain residency and citizenship in countries including Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, Vanuatu, Nauru, and the United Arab Emirates. Fox has also designed citizenship and residence by investment programs for other governments, including one for a country in the Middle East and one currently in progress for an island nation.

The business was originally built for U.S. citizens, and the first wave came after October 7.

"I started getting a lot of calls from friends of mine and clients of mine who were Jewish," she says. "They were saying, antisemitism is rising in the US. My grandmother was in the Holocaust, my grandfather, my aunt, my uncle. I'm afraid the US is becoming too antisemitic. I want to get another passport." Most, she notes, are choosing island nations or Latin America over Europe.

The second wave was LGBTQ clients after passport rules changed to require biological sex at birth. Fox describes clients, both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals, whose spouses and children do not know they transitioned. "They wanted a passport that they could feel comfortable traveling around the world in that would reflect their new sex."

The third wave was driven by fear for American democracy itself. "Wealthy people were saying, just in case, I want an exit strategy. I don't want to be the last one off a sinking ship."

And now, the fourth wave: foreign nationals who no longer feel safe in either their home country or the United States. A Ukrainian whose TPS is expiring and who is looking for residence in Europe. A Venezuelan seeking citizenship somewhere stable. A wealthy Haitian who cannot put their children in school at home because, as Fox puts it, "there's anarchy."

"Where it started, initially helping Jews get that third country residence or passport for fear of another Holocaust, turned into LGBTQ, turned into fear for democracy, turned into foreign nationals," she says. "Now everyone wants a third country passport or third country residence as a kind of security blanket, a way out."

She is candid that these programs generally require investments of a couple hundred thousand dollars. But the demand, she says, reflects a broader shift in how the world sees the United States. "A lot of people are afraid of investing money here. We're getting a little bit of a stained reputation abroad." People, she adds, are increasingly choosing other countries before they choose the U.S.

Tammy Fox's Message to the Profession, and to Everyone Else

Asked if there was anything she had not yet said, Fox set aside the lawyer's voice.

"The one thing I'm going to talk about as a human being, not as a lawyer, and maybe I'm going to get tears in my eyes because of my last consultation, which is heartbreaking," she began.

"I don't care if you support this administration or not. Nobody should ever support the incarceration of a 3-year-old or a 5-year-old or an 86-year-old woman, or somebody with end-stage cancer, or with a child with end-stage cancer, or a type 1 diabetic, in what are inhumane conditions. Nobody, no human being, should ever support this. I don't care what your politics are."

She told a story about an intern who had sat in on that last consultation.

"I said, I will be long gone when you're an adult and you're 40 years old. I probably won't be on this earth anymore. But you will remember the stain on our history when we treated people as less than human beings. This will go down as a real stain on American history."

Fox has spent four decades on every side of the immigration system: prosecuting for the government, defending people in removal, building business cases for executives and investors, and now helping people leave. Her advice to practitioners is to stop choosing a side of the profession, because the system no longer lets clients choose.

Her advice to everyone else is simpler. Keep some Kleenex nearby.