Kellen Powell

Attorney | Father | Husband | Advocate

Kellen Powell

Professionalism

Providing professional advice in immigration is of paramount importance, that is why I take every case I handle with the seriousness it deserves. Each petition is your life, your ability to live and work in the United States. You should only trust your immigration work to someone who understands how important each petition is to the person receiving the benefit.

Expertise

I have been practicing employment-based immigration for ten years and I've gained a wealth of knowledge in that time. I take the time to do the research into each issue so that each case gets the attention it deserves.

PERM: I have reviewed and filed thousands of PERM's for multiple employers with different strategies. By working on so many PERM's for companies in different industries and different needs I have learned how to construct a PERM that meets the needs of each individual situation. There are a million ways to get a PERM denied, and hundreds of ways to do it right.

I have worked on just about every PERM situation, helping with refilings for employers under agreed-to frameworks after settling with DOL, supervised recruitment, audits, and appeals.

NIV (H-1B, L, TN, etc.): Throughout my career I have worked on NIV cases for multiple employers and under different regimes. I have done the easiest of H-1B's like cap-exempt university professors in hard sciences to the hardest cases with degree issues and right to control questions under the Trump administration. In that time I have only received a few denials, several of which were reversed when we appealed in federal court.

Naturalization: Who doesn't love naturalization? Even the officers at the Field Offices love naturalization. Naturalization can be trickier than you expect, you may already be a citizen and don't even know it, or maybe you a permanent resident and you have been living and working outside the U.S. so much that you don't appear to qualify (but you might).

Permanent Residency: There are so many ways to become a permanent resident and so many weird rules about who is elgible. We are also in a moment right now when just monitoring a pending employment-based I-485 is a skill. There are tens of thousands of I-485 petitions that were filed in 2020 and 2021 that will be sitting for years. Over the last year USCIS has created chaos for those applicants by sitting on advance parole adjudications for long periods. I stay abreast of advocacy methods that help people get their AP's approved in a timely manner.

Wins

Who doesn't love a good victory?!

The story of the reverse successor-in-interest, plus a downgrade.

In 2020, a client came to me with a unique situation. Company A was a holding company that owned Company B and Company C. Company A just sold Company C and the majority of their workforce was moving to the new company. Company A wanted to retain Ravi and file his application for permanent residency (I-485). To do this Company A would have to file a downgrade petition to move the I-140 from EB-2 to EB-3 along with the I-485. The problem was that Company C (which had already been sold) filed the original PERM and I-140. In order to file the I-140 downgrade we had to provide proof that when Company A sold Company C, Company A became a successor-in-interest for Ravi. By working with Company A and the M&A law firm I was able to get the whole thing filed and approved. This win felt great for everyone involved because Ravi and Company A had been told by several firms that it wasn't possible.

The Supervised Recruitment Delitizer

In 2021, a client I was working with was getting hit by a lot of supervised recruitment requests (a lot still only encompasses 10 or less a month). One of my PERM's was selected for supervised recruitment, and predictably the case did not make it through recruitment without finding and qualified applicants. Not all hope was lost though, this employer had what might have been the largest PERM program in the world and ran what is sometimes called "batch" recruitment, where the employer runs recruitment with more generalized requirements multiple times a year so they can move hundreds of people through each recruitment effort. The problem we encountered in this case was that the employee only qualified under two of the batch recruitment titles, one of which resulted in a failed supervised recruitment.

When a supervised recruitment fails the employer generally has to submit their next PERM to the supervised recruitment office directly and go through supervised recruitment as the first recruitment effort. To get around this we decided to do a Delitizer chart showing how the jobs were different. The second PERM was denied because DOL said we were required to go through supervised recruitment because it was the same job. We appealed and showed the jobs were different and received a certified PERM three weeks later.

This employee had been through the ringer, but we were finally able to get them back on the path to achieving the American Dream.

The Naturalization Client Who Was Already a Citizen

In 2020, a client came to me asking me to help them naturalize. They had always kicked themselves for not applying with the rest of their family when they were kids. It turns out that Amy was already a citizen, twice-over. Amy's mother naturalized when Amy was a minor because Amy's grandfather had served with the US Army in the Philippines (Philippine naturalization was a big deal to the original President Bush). Amy's father also naturalized when Amy was a minor.

To test my theory that Amy was already a citizen we applied for a U.S. passport and a certificate of citizenship from USCIS. To our great delight, both were approved. It was a bit of a scary situation for Amy when she was holding the U.S. passport but still hadn't heard from USCIS on whether they thought she was a citizen. Eventually, the certificate of naturalization came in and Amy was free to live her life as a US Citizen.

The New Office L, maybe...

In 2020, a client came to me wanting to get an L to send one of their executives to the US to grow their business locally and supervise the construction and staffing of a plant. At first blush the case appeared to be a new office L which is much harder to get approved. As we dug into the the case we realized we could avoid the new office regulations because the company had an office in the US that had been staffed by local employees. Then the complications began to arise. First, the employee being sent to the US was an executive but was only getting paid $84,000 a year. This sort of salary for an executive isn't uncommon in smaller companies, especially companies based in countries where $84,000 goes a long way. It does however make USCIS wonder about the executive functions the person is undertaking. After doing a ton of document gathering, job description writing, and providing invoices we were able to prove the position was an executive position and got the L-1A approved.

Pro tip: I learned this from a mento years ago, USCIS is very picky about employers choosing either executive or manager for L-1A's. They have different standards so ensure you are choosing the right one, USCIS won't let you sit on both sides of the fence.

Outside of Work.

Family is the most important part of my life. I have a wonderful wife, who is also an immigration attorney. We nerd out about abstract concepts in immigration all the time. I have two kids, a boy and a girl. The kids make me laugh so hard, even when they don't understand why.

I am a big soccer fan, my teams are the US and Portland Timbers. PTFC, PTFC, PTFC... something Seattle.

I love gardening, especially roses. I have a tendency to take my gardening a little too far, but I grew up on a farm, so what else would be expected.

I spent 10 years in the Army. The seed of love for immigration was actually sparked by my time in the service. I had the macro level questions like, why do I get to live such a privileged life compared to other people just because I was born in America? I also had the case-specific questions like, why did that interpreter get their green card and relocation package so quickly while my interpreter has been waiting three years and has been kidnapped twice since they were originally approved for the program? Now I practice employment-based immigration and I LOVE IT.

Kellen Powell

Professionalism

Expertise

Wins

The story of the reverse successor-in-interest, plus a downgrade.

The Supervised Recruitment Delitizer

The Naturalization Client Who Was Already a Citizen

The New Office L, maybe...

Outside of Work.

Family is the most important part of my life. I have a wonderful wife, who is also an immigration attorney. We nerd out about abstract concepts in immigration all the time. I have two kids, a boy and a girl. The kids make me laugh so hard, even when they don't understand why.

I am a big soccer fan, my teams are the US and Portland Timbers. PTFC, PTFC, PTFC... *something* Seattle.

I love gardening, especially roses. I have a tendency to take my gardening a little too far, but I grew up on a farm, so what else would be expected.

I am a big soccer fan, my teams are the US and Portland Timbers. PTFC, PTFC, PTFC... something Seattle.