There is a moment in almost every visa interview that quietly works against the applicant, and it is not the question they stayed up rehearsing. It is the moment they reach across the counter and try to hand the consular officer a thick folder of documents.

For nearly ten years, Matt Hughes sat on the other side of that window. He watched applicant after applicant arrive armored with paperwork, and he came to understand something most attorneys, trained to win on the page, rarely stop to consider. The page is not what wins.

"It is easy to fake a document," he says, repeating the lesson drilled into every State Department officer. "It is much harder to fake an interview."

Matt’s consular experience is value-added for all types of immigration petitions and the reason a growing number of business founders, manufacturers, and researchers end up on the phone with him.

From Philadelphia to the Consular Window

Hughes did not start his career in immigration. After clerking for a judge in Washington, DC, he began his career practicing criminal defense in Philadelphia, work he describes as challenging, high-stakes, and formative. In 2009 he joined the U.S. State Department, and over the next decade he served at embassies and consulates in Kathmandu, Belmopan, and Munich, with the usual swings back through Washington in between. He adjudicated immigrant and non-immigrant visas, trained officers, ran a visa unit, and worked on fraud prevention.

He also chose his postings with a cyclist's logic. His career goals, he admits with characteristic dryness, were partly about going where the cycling was great, and it was great in all of them. He raised little kids in Belize, where you are not fighting with mittens and hats and gloves. He picked up Nepali in Kathmandu, which he still trots out occasionally at parties, sharpened the German he already had, and added some Spanish along the way.

What he learned about fraud was less about catching one bad document and more about reading patterns. Trends would surface at a post when officers started noticing the same unusual story arriving again and again. In Kathmandu, where there was a significant fraud operation, that meant verifying student records and building relationships with local institutions so claims could be checked. The colorful cases stuck with him, like the sudden wave of applicants all headed to the same conveniently timed trade show. As he puts it, the story falls apart fast when you claim to be a concrete engineer and you do not know anything about concrete.

But the deeper takeaway was the one about the interview. Officers, he says, are not primarily grading the packet. They are reading the person.

The Pandemic Jinx and a Hard Landing in Portland

By 2019, the Foreign Service life was no longer the best choice for Matt or his family, and when the next posting on the table was Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, the family vote was clear. He started his own firm in Munich, Germany instead, where he knew demand for U.S. immigration help ran high.

Then he tells on himself. At a New Year's party heading into 2020, riding a wave of early momentum, he announced that if things kept going this well, he would be hiring by summer. "And that's how I jinxed it and caused the pandemic," he says. "It was me, and I apologize for that."

The timing could hardly have been worse. By spring of 2020, travel from Europe was shut down. He landed instead in Portland, Oregon, where things stayed slow for a stretch before people started traveling again.  Business picked up and it has been growing ever since.

Today his firm, BorderCall, runs under the banner of Modern Immigration Law. The work is high-touch and deliberately nimble, the kind of practice where a mid-sized manufacturer or a startup founder can call the attorney directly and ask what a development means for their strategy. The bread and butter is business immigration, the H, L, O, and E categories, often for European founders coming to start companies, plus manufacturing and tech clients and a steady stream of family immigration matters. And because of his background, the tricky consular cases keep finding him even though he has never really taken the time to market himself as the consular guy.

He runs the firm with a right hand he was lucky to recruit, a former colleague from the U.S. Consulate in Munich who gave twenty years of service to the U.S. government across Berlin and Munich and now lives in the United States. She came here imagining a quieter life, maybe a little knitting, maybe a little work. Hughes had other plans, and she was happy to reunite with him.

Why the Visa Interview Is Won Before a Single Question

Ask Hughes what he tells an attorney prepping a client, and he flips the usual approach on its head. Clients constantly want to know which questions will come. He thinks that is the wrong thing to fixate on.

"The burden is on the applicant to explain why they're qualified for the visa," he says. So instead of drilling a list of possible questions, he helps clients boil their case down to a few simple points they can hold onto under stress, then deliver them without waiting to be asked. Lead with who you are, the reasons you qualify, and any past problems addressed head on.

The instinct to passively answer questions, or worse, to slide that folder across the counter, is exactly where applicants lose. "Once you're doing that, you've already lost control," he says. The goal is the opposite. He wants the client in the driver's seat of the interview, because an applicant who makes the officer's job easier tends to walk out with a visa.

What has changed most since his government years is the rise of social media vetting. That forces a more holistic and frankly more delicate conversation about a client's online presence. Has the client posted anything that could read as controversial? If so, Hughes prepares them to get ahead of it, sometimes raising it in the first moments of the interview, framing a past post in its real context and connecting it back to shared values rather than letting an officer discover it cold.

A Redemption Story Behind the Glass

When asked about a memorable recent case involving consular interview prep, Hughes returned to a foreign national whose visa renewal was repeatedly denied following a prior lapse in judgment that resulted in an isolated legal issue. By the time the case reached Hughes, the client had already faced multiple refusals at the consulate.

That is a deep hole. As he explains, consular officers are reluctant to approve a case they have already refused, partly because reversals can signal that persistence pays and balloon everyone's wait times. The work, then, became deeply focused on accountability. You made a serious mistake, Hughes told the client, but it does not have to define your future.

Together, they ensured the underlying legal matter was fully resolved and reframed the consular interview entirely. Instead of offering a defense, the client approached the interview as an act of accepting responsibility, depicting the return to the United States not as a gift to the client, but as an opportunity to make amends to the U.S. community where the client had made their mistake. When the approval finally came through, it landed hard for both of them. "That felt really good," he says, describing the kind of emotional bond that forms when you walk beside someone through a difficult time and see them out the other side.

That experience shaped the advice he now gives other attorneys facing a second or third interview. Lead with the bad news. Naming the problem first builds rapport and trust with the officer. Prepare the client for the question every officer is silently asking when someone reappears at the window: why are you back, and what is different today?

Hughes coaches clients to take it on the chin. Rather than blaming a previous officer who interrupted or misunderstood, even when that is fair and true, the more productive opening is simple honesty about the weakness of the case or presentation during the last attempt.

Hughes appreciates the rewards of preparing clients for consular interviews. Where an employment-based green card might take ten years from start to finish, a consular case can resolve in a couple of weeks, and the gratitude is immediate. He has a soft spot, too, for complex business immigration cases because they let him learn about the client’s area of expertise, whether that is advanced manufacturing or high-tech design.

Matt Hughes on the Best Advice for Immigrants Right Now

For all the strategy, his closing advice for anyone in the immigration journey is grounded and unglamorous. It is a tough moment to be navigating the system, he acknowledges, and the margin for error is thin. So keep good records. Get your documents in order and your travel history into one deep, organized file. Update the resume you have not touched in two years, and make sure it actually lines up with the story you are telling. Read through absolutely everything.

The little details matter more than ever, he says, because right now officers are looking for any small thing that might cause an issue.

It is fitting counsel from a man who spent nearly a decade as the person making the decisions that can be life changing for visa applicants. Hughes built his immigration practice on a simple, hard-earned edge. He can still step into the shoes of an officer and, and he ensures his clients are prepared to address an immigration officer’s concerns.