Melissa Warburton spent her career at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services doing the work that decides cases like yours.

As an attorney in the Chief Counsel's office at the USCIS Texas Service Center, Melissa supported the very team that adjudicates the nation's employment-based petitions. She advised the officers deciding EB-1A, National Interest Waiver, and O-1 cases, on the questions that actually determine outcomes: whether a criterion is met on the evidence presented, how much weight a particular kind of proof carries, where the record supports the conclusion an officer wants to reach and where it does not.

That vantage point is not something a petition attorney can acquire from the outside. Melissa knows how a file moves through the service center, how a decision gets drafted under production pressure, which arguments an officer has seen a hundred times, and what a denial looks like when the officer never engaged the record at all. She has read the internal reasoning behind decisions that petitioners only ever see as a final notice.

She also served as agency counsel on hundreds of federal litigation cases. When a petitioner sued the government, Melissa was on the other side of the caption, defending the agency's decisions in federal court. She knows which cases the government fights and which it quietly reopens, how a denial is defended once it reaches a judge, and where an agency decision becomes indefensible. That is the same analysis she now runs for petitioners, from the opposite direction.

She brings that knowledge to two kinds of work. Petitions she builds are built against the review she knows is coming, addressing the objections before an officer raises them. Denials she reviews are measured against the record they claim to describe, which is how the errors surface.

Melissa has been a litigator throughout her career. She began in federal court, clerking for the late Judge Jorge Solis in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, then spent years as a trial attorney trying cases to juries. Before USCIS she served as Assistant Chief Counsel for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. When an agency decision cannot be reconciled with the record before it, she takes the matter to federal court, including actions under the Administrative Procedure Act and mandamus actions challenging unreasonable delay.

Melissa's practice covers the full range of first-preference and high-skill categories: EB-1A extraordinary ability, EB-1B outstanding professors and researchers, EB-1C multinational managers and executives, EB-2 National Interest Waiver, and O-1A and O-1B petitions. She represents researchers, scientists, academics, entrepreneurs, and business leaders.

Melissa is licensed in Texas and authorized to practice immigration law throughout the United States. She is a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the State Bar of Texas.