Picture a software engineer from Bangalore who has spent eight years building products at a DC-area startup. She has a mortgage, a kid in elementary school, and a green card application that has been in the queue since the year her child was born.
The person standing between her and a deportation order isn’t a politician or a policy wonk. It’s her immigration attorney – working the phones, filing the responses, finding the pathways that keep her employed and her family intact.
When it works, nobody outside that case ever knows it happened.
That anonymity is not an accident; it’s baked into how immigration law functions. The wins are quiet, and the losses are both devastating and private. And the attorneys absorbing years of that emotional and legal weight do so in a profession that has, until now, offered virtually no formal public recognition in return.
That changes now. Boston-based Build is launching The Immies – the first national awards program dedicated exclusively to immigration attorneys. The inaugural ceremony will be held at theAILA Annual Conference in San Diego on June 17, with nominations open to the entire immigration community through May 30.
The policy backdrop makes the launch feel overdue. ICE held an average of 69,600 people in detention per day in December 2025, a 78% increase year over year, while more than half of people moving through immigration court are doing it without a lawyer.
Those who do have representation are relying on attorneys who are simultaneously absorbing a record number of Board of Immigration Appeals decisions since January 2025 that keep shifting the legal ground beneath their feet, fielding panicked calls from clients affected by the January 2026 suspension of immigrant visa processing for nationals of 75 countries, and reworking employment strategies for companies caught off guard by a new $100,000 fee on H-1B petitions filed outside the U.S.
The workload has expanded dramatically, but the recognition hasn’t moved at all.
For Washington, that recognition gap has consequences that extend well beyond any individual attorney’s career satisfaction. The US is projected to need an additional 1 million STEM professionals by 2033, and green card backlogs for workers from India and China stretch for decades in some employment categories.
The legal ecosystem that helps American companies compete for that talent – the attorneys who know how to build a cap-exempt H-1B case, who can turn around a bulletproof RFE response, who understand the twenty different ways a visa petition can go sideways and how to prevent each one – is exactly the kind of specialized human infrastructure that takes a generation to build and is very easy to starve.
Law students choose careers where their expertise is valued and their work is visible. When immigration law doesn’t offer that, the field loses people it genuinely cannot afford to.
“Immigration attorneys carry the weight of others’ lives,” said Danielle Goldman, co-founder and CEO of Build, whose own father practiced immigration law. “Most will never be publicly recognized for that work. The Immies exist to make sure they are.”
The program spans ten categories that reflect what the profession actually looks like day-to-day, including a Paralegal of the Year for the people keeping practices operationally afloat across hundreds of simultaneous cases and a People’s Choice Award that gives foreign nationals a direct voice in naming who deserves recognition.
That last one matters: in a field where the attorney does the work and the client lives with the outcome, handing the microphone to the people most affected feels less like a nice gesture and more like a long overdue correction.
Build operates cap-exempt H-1B, J-1, and O-1 programs for global talent and U.S. employers, and was founded on the success of Build Fellowship by Open Avenues, one of the country’s few nationwide cap-exempt H-1B fellowships.
Nominations are open at buildfellowship.com/immies-2026.
Featured image: Joseph Chan via Unsplash+
Disclosure: This article mentions clients of an Espacio portfolio company.
