She was a child when she first encountered American immigration law, and it wore a uniform.

The year was 1992. Julia Sverdloff and her parents had arrived on a Delta flight from Ukraine, beginning a new life in the United States as refugees, and were being inspected by federal immigration and customs inspectors. Most children would remember the fear. She remembers the curiosity.

"I was so enthralled with, what are these laws, and what are these uniformed people talking to us about?" she says. "Because I had a feeling that if I understood the laws, this is what our country is about."

More than three decades later, Julia Sverdloff is the founder of Sverdloff Law Group, P.C. in Chicago, licensed in Illinois, New York, and New Jersey, and she spends her days helping families navigate the immigration system she first encountered as a child. What follows is her account of how she got there, what she is seeing on the front lines right now, and the two things she believes protect a client's case more than any technology: relentless preparation, and a lawyer willing to admit what they do not know.

The detour: why Julia Sverdloff left internet law and insurance defense

Immigration was not the first stop. It was not even the second.

Sverdloff graduated from The John Marshall Law School, now the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law in 2007 and took a job at a New Jersey firm practicing information technology and internet law. Software licensing, policies, sweepstakes, independent contractor agreements. Her boss made the terms clear early.

"He said, you're never going to go to court. See that court across the street? You're not going to go to court," she recalls. "Because your job is as a corporate internet lawyer."

It was good experience, and it was unfamiliar territory she taught herself. But she did not want to be boxed in geographically either, so she sat for the New York bar and moved into insurance defense, serving as outside counsel to AIG. That meant courtrooms, finally. It meant Staten Island and every other borough. It also meant a pattern she noticed faster than most lawyers do.

"I realized that I'm arguing the same things, just in different courts," she says. Statute of limitations. Policy coverage. The same handful of arguments in rotation, because the client was always the insurer.

Then came the sentence that defines her career more than any credential on her wall:

"I didn't want to be the lawyer who in 20 years does the same thing, talks about the same things."

So she went out on her own. And the practice found her before she went looking for it.

"Naturally, as an immigrant, you got immigrant clients," she says. She had already been drawn deeper into the work through her alma mater, where she served as an adjunct professor in its Domestic Violence Legal Advocacy Clinic, supervising law students who handled U visas, T visas, and Violence Against Women Act petitions. She also helped establish the American Association of Russian-Speaking Attorneys.

Going solo was less a business decision than an inheritance. "I think every immigrant who comes to America wants to be their own business owner," she says. "You decide who to represent."

The trust came early, too. Before she was even licensed, people were bringing her their problems. "I already had people entrusting me. I just couldn't advise them," she says. "So I had to refer a lot of clients."

Inside Sverdloff Law Group: a practice split evenly between hope and emergency

Today, Sverdloff Law Group’s practice spans both affirmative immigration matters and high-stakes removal defense.

Its affirmative practice includes national interest waivers, EB-1 and EB-2 petitions, fiancé(e) visas, adjustment of status, and L-1 intracompany transfers, the paperwork of people building something.

Its defense practice includes removal proceedings in immigration court, mandamus actions against the government, habeas corpus petitions, and bond hearings. “Now you need a lot of those,” Sverdloff says, “because many clients need emergency challenges to detention that may be unlawful or lack adequate process.”

Because immigration law is federal, the client base is not bounded by Chicago, or by Illinois, or by the United States. Referrals arrive from across the country and around the world, largely by word of mouth.

"It's a whirlwind," she says.

What Julia Sverdloff sees on the immigration front lines that the headlines miss

Ask her what people outside the field should understand about the current moment, and she does not start with policy. She starts with a room.

Mega-master hearings and the paperwork nobody explains

"Immigration courts right now have what are called mega-master hearings," she says. Individuals appearing without an attorney arrive not knowing which room they belong in. "Like 100 individuals in one room, handing out paper, and you don't even know what you're supposed to fill out."

The consequence of that confusion is not a rescheduled appointment. If the confusion causes someone to miss or misunderstand a future hearing date and then fail to appear, the court may enter an in absentia removal order.

The Chicago Tribune recently interviewed Sverdloff for its reporting on Chicago's crowded mega-master hearings and the rise in removal orders, bringing her front-line observations into the broader public conversation.

Green card holders detained on return

The risk now extends to people who assumed they were long past it. Sverdloff describes a longtime permanent resident who was detained after international travel because of a decades-old issue in her record. "Now she needs a bond motion, she needs representation."

Travel restrictions, 221(g) refusals, and vetting that never ends

For clients still abroad, the obstacle may be a new entry restriction, an unexpected consular refusal, or heightened vetting that did not exist when the case began. In one matter, Sverdloff helped a client naturalize and petition for a parent abroad, only to see shifting restrictions and vetting introduce a new layer of uncertainty by the time of the visa interview.

At the interview, the parent received a refusal under INA § 221(g), often issued when a consulate needs additional documentation or further administrative processing.

The delays are structural, not incidental. Sverdloff says adjudication resources are increasingly being redirected to additional vetting, leaving fewer officers to process routine cases. "It's exhausting," she says.

She is blunt about what she views as the erosion of the post-World War II refugee-protection framework. "All these protocols came out after World War II, on asylum and refuge," she says, "and its being dismantling."

Retrospective review: when naturalization reaches back 15 years

The most consequential shift, in her view, is quieter than any of the above. It is a single word: consistency.

“She is seeing increased scrutiny of consistency across prior filings, including in naturalization cases involving older records,” Sverdloff says.

She offers a case that shows how small the trigger can be. A longtime green card holder applied for naturalization without counsel and was denied after USCIS found a discrepancy in a much older visa application. An emergency-contact name had been entered in the wrong field, even though the surrounding record supported the client's eligibility at the time.

"It was just incongruent," Sverdloff says. The error appeared clerical, but the government treated it as material.

Sverdloff's team filed 10 to 12 pages of argument, affidavits, and proof of employment, arguing the error would not have changed the outcome because the client was eligible and had demonstrated the right intent. The denial stood.

Her warning to the profession is a technological one. "They have a lot more resources now. Federal immigration agencies now publicly catalog AI use cases and rely on increasingly sophisticated data-matching tools," she says. "And if they find some incongruity from way back, they use that as an opportunity to say, oops, that green card you had, you shouldn't have had that."

Julia Sverdloff on AI in immigration law: "There is no substitute for legal reasoning"

Given that adversary, you might expect her to be defensive about artificial intelligence. She is not. She is precise about it. "We have to adapt," she says. "Many firms have already started incorporating it.”  She encourages her staff to use it. She uses it herself for country conditions research, the same way she would use a search engine, with confidentiality safeguards and independent verification of every material source and conclusion.

What she will not do is ask it to think. "There's no substitute for legal reasoning," she says. "I'm not going to use AI to think like a lawyer, because it won't."

Her reason is the sharpest critique of AI-assisted legal work in this entire interview, and it comes from direct experience:

"How many times have I told ChatGPT or Claude, no, you're wrong. And it's like, yeah, you're right, Julia. It only gives you what you were asking for. It will tell you that you have a good case for a national interest waiver, because it's just feeding from what you are giving it."

An AI tool may give a response that appears persuasive based on the facts presented to it. An adjudicator, however, evaluates the full record, applies the law independently, and may focus on facts or inconsistencies the user did not anticipate. That is why AI output must be carefully tested, not simply accepted as a case assessment.

She has a second objection, more craft than logic. Drafting has to sound like a person. 

"Knowing your own cases and drafting it so that it's like a human and not like a robot," she says. "It's just so easy to spot."

Why immigration lawyers will not be automated away

Sverdloff's long-term view is confident, and her reasoning is worth quoting in full because it is structural rather than sentimental.

"I don't think there will ever be a substitute for lawyers, especially immigration lawyers," she explains. 

“AI may accelerate a first-pass summary or translation, but it cannot replace attorney judgment, client preparation, or advocacy. The core of the work resists automation.”

"By nature, your asylum cases, presentation in court, it's all driven by your direct examination of a client, and the government’s cross," she says. "It's all human driven."

“A machine cannot stand up and examine a witness. You could use AI for your briefs, for your country conditions, but it's not a substitute."

How Sverdloff Law Group protects outcomes in a chaotic policy environment

Asked what she does differently now to protect quality and client outcomes, her answer starts somewhere unglamorous.

"Everything starts with not missing any deadlines," she says.

That means the firm uses case-monitoring tools and docket controls to identify case updates promptly rather than relying solely on mailed notices. “As opposed to waiting for something a week and getting that correspondence, and then your time frame to respond gets less and less.”

It also means constant intake of a moving target. "Last week there were two new updates, one about duration of status and another about poverty guidelines," she says. "And they always come out on Fridays. It's a horrible thing."

The third defense is her colleagues. Sverdloff leans on the American Immigration Lawyers Association network constantly. "If I need somebody who's in a niche, like denaturalization, you bet I'm going to talk to someone who's handled X amount of those cases."

And the fourth is the discipline of saying no. "I'm selective in the cases that I take, because if I take on a case, I want to make sure I give it 110 percent," she says. She had turned down a matter that same morning, because she already knew what deadlines were on her calendar.

Underneath all four is a single sentence about accountability that no software can absorb for her: "At the end of the day, it's my name, it's my firm, my reputation."

She is candid about the toll. "It's become more about avoiding fires and making sure you're not missing anything than taking a breath and enjoying it."

The case that came down to one critical document

Ask for a success story and she protests that there are too many. Then she picks one, and the details explain why it stayed with her.

The client had spent more than a decade in the United States and had an approved employment-based petition. At the same time, an immigration-court matter remained pending.

The case became more complicated when it moved to an unfamiliar jurisdiction, requiring close attention to a record assembled over many years.

“I’m so stressed out because I don’t know that court,” Sverdloff says. “It’s all new.” The stakes extended well beyond a single hearing.

Midway through the case, country conditions changed in ways that required a substantially revised legal strategy. She had to reassess the record and prepare a different brief while preserving the client’s parallel immigration options.

The client ultimately succeeded.

"Thank God I had all my ducks in a row," she says. And then the line that could serve as the thesis of her entire practice:

“It came down to having the right documentation to show that he had always been compliant,” she says.

The pivotal evidence was located in the client’s historical immigration record. She is quick to say the client never saw half of the work: the back and forth with government counsel and the preparation that meant she had an answer ready when a specific question arose.

Why ego is the biggest risk to your client's case

That preparation had a source she is unusually willing to name. For that case, she called two or three other lawyers.

"I got something out of every single one, because I wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything," she says.

Then she generalizes it into the most transferable piece of advice in the interview: “When we have egos as lawyers, and in any profession, you are doing your client a disservice.”

Her analogy is to physicians who stop keeping up because they assume the science is settled. "As a lawyer, you have to make sure you're on top of your stuff, that you don't miss anything, that it's current, because there are so many changes," she says. "And it's not a bad idea, if the stakes are higher, to always ask for help from other colleagues to get your client the best result. It's so satisfying."

The artist who became an immigration lawyer

There is a version of this story where none of it happens. Sverdloff volunteered it herself, near the end of the conversation, almost as an afterthought.

"I wasn't supposed to even go to law school," she says. "I got accepted to Parsons School of Art. I'm supposed to be an artist."

Her parents, immigrants who had already gambled everything once, were not enthusiastic. "When they found out, they were like, you're going to be a struggling artist."

She still paints. One of her pieces made it onto television: a classmate in her entertainment law course worked on set decoration for the series Prison Break, asked whether Sverdloff had any art, and used one of her pieces on the show. 

But the reason the art matters here is not the anecdote. It is the method she says it gave her. "You step away from your art and you see what's missing," she says. "And every time you look at it and step back, you realize you spot issues. Same thing with law. So many times I'm like, okay, just submit it, it's perfect. And the more you review your brief, the more you want to change things."

That instinct, to walk away from the canvas so you can see it clearly, is the same instinct that made her call three colleagues before a hearing in an unfamiliar court in Indianapolis.

"I think art made me a better lawyer," she says.

What is next for Julia Sverdloff and Sverdloff Law Group

Her ambition for the year ahead is specific and, notably, not about herself.

The goal is to expand the firm's removal-defense capacity without sacrificing the preparation and personal accountability on which she has built the practice.

"People trust me, so they want to speak to me," she says, explaining why she is still the one taking consults and expects to remain so.

It is a fitting place for her story to land. The child who wanted to understand the laws so she could understand the country grew into the lawyer people call when the laws stop making sense. What she wants now is more room to explain them.

Key takeaways from Julia Sverdloff

Preparation beats brilliance. In one significant employment-based matter, the outcome hinged on careful review of historical records and documentation demonstrating continuous compliance.

Ego is a liability. Sverdloff consulted two to three outside attorneys on a single high-stakes matter and considers refusing to ask for help a disservice to the client.

AI can validate a user's premise, adjudicators do not. She uses AI for research and encourages her staff to use it, but warns that an agreeable output is the wrong signal in a case assessment.

Consistency is the current enforcement lens. Notices of intent to deny and naturalization denials are increasingly triggered by decades-old inconsistencies in prior filings, including clerical mistakes.

The government is using more sophisticated technology too. Sverdloff warns that expanded data matching and publicly cataloged AI use make historical discrepancies easier to surface at scale.

Selectivity protects quality. She declines cases when her existing deadline load would prevent her from giving a new matter full attention.

Julia Sverdloff is the founder and managing attorney of Sverdloff Law Group, P.C., a Chicago-based immigration firm serving clients nationwide and internationally. A former adjunct professor at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law, a licensed mediator, and a founding board member of the American Association of Russian-Speaking Attorneys, she is licensed in Illinois, New York, and New Jersey and admitted before the U.S. Supreme Court and multiple federal district courts. Her immigration commentary and advocacy have been featured by the Chicago Tribune and Injustice Watch. She is a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and serves on the governing board of the Parks Foundation of her local community