What is the current state of U.S. immigration—and how does it affect real people navigating the system today?
In this episode, immigration attorney Hillary Walsh, founder of New Frontier Immigration, joins Rosaria Cain for an in-depth conversation about the realities of U.S. immigration law, the challenges facing families and businesses, and why the system is often far more complex than it appears from the outside.
Hillary explains how immigration processes actually work—from green cards and family-based petitions to tourist visas and humanitarian parole—and why wait times can stretch decades for some applicants. She shares real-world examples from her legal practice that highlight how policy, enforcement, and administrative delays impact families, employers, and individuals trying to follow the law.
The discussion also explores how immigration enforcement has evolved, what happens during workplace raids and detention, and why misconceptions like “just get in line” oversimplify a system filled with legal barriers and unintended consequences. Hillary offers insight into how attorneys, families, and business owners are adapting amid ongoing uncertainty, and why immigration reform remains a long-term, complex issue.
This episode also covers:
- How the U.S. immigration system differs from other countries
- Green card backlogs and family reunification challenges
- Tourist visas, work authorization, and admissibility risks
- Humanitarian parole and emergency entry requests
- The emotional and operational strain on immigration law firms
- Leadership, entrepreneurship, and managing a growing legal practice
Whether you’re directly affected by immigration policy or simply want a clearer understanding of how the system functions in practice, this conversation provides valuable perspective grounded in experience and real cases.
Listen now for a thoughtful, informative discussion on immigration law, policy, and the human side of the process.
Full Transcript
Rosaria Cain 00:00
Hi, welcome Hillary Walsh of New Frontier Immigration, we’re so happy to have you today.
Hillary Walsh 00:05
Thank you for having me.
Rosaria Cain 00:07
A lot of big issues to talk about today, and certainly no hotter issue than immigration. I’m going to guess how you would describe the current climate, but I’ll let you tell it your way. How would you discuss the current climate right now for immigration?
Hillary Walsh 00:23
Kind of a dumpster fire is probably the easiest way to describe it, but there are people and their lives inside the dumpster. So it is a very chaotic time. We’ve experienced this previously, when we had an administration with the Trump administration, last time we experienced some of this, but a lot of that was at the border and inside detention centers, and then this time, we’re seeing it on the actual streets, and U.S. citizens being apprehended, and it’s a lot broader and even more chaotic this time.
Rosaria Cain 00:53
How would you describe the current climate for immigrants right now?
Hillary Walsh 00:59
I think that there’s an intense campaign of fear. So when we think about marketing, the Trump administration has marketed fear very intensely, not only to people who don’t like what the Trump administration is doing. There’s, you know, this alleged domestic terrorist list that people are being put on if you go to protests or those sorts of things. There’s information about your cell phone location is being tracked, and so if you’re at protest, they can tell, even if they don’t know who you are, they can see that you were physically there. They’re collecting that sort of data. And so there’s fear around that. But then for immigrants themselves, there’s a damned if I do, damned if I don’t feeling because if I go to court and I continue doing things the right way, I may be arrested in court. We’re seeing less and less of that as the year as his administration has kind of gone on, but I have clients who they’ve been in the in the process for 10 or 15 years now, and their process just keeps getting extended and extended and extended, potentially to no end, it seems like. And so there’s this intense campaign of fear that I would describe as immigration right now.
Rosaria Cain 02:11
How is the temperature in Arizona?
Speaker 1 02:14
It’s heating up. We have ice right now. Doing raids of businesses. This was kind of on the news in the past couple of days, so doing raids of businesses, shutting down places that have multiple locations here in the valley, and just doing an entire raid, holding people who are inside these restaurants and making sure that they are not allowed to leave until they’re given permission to do so. Stuff that is it feels very, very anti-American, because we don’t like to be told what we can and can’t do, and we don’t like to be searched and seized without a lot of due process. And the temperature is definitely heating up here in Arizona.
Rosaria Cain 02:51
What misconceptions do you think people have that maybe aren’t seeing the whole story?
Hillary Walsh 02:58
There seems to be a belief that there’s a line that everyone can just get in. And if you get in that line, and you stay there, and you follow the little rules, it will lead you to a green card and permission to be in the United States and work here legally. What people don’t realize is it’s like a line that’s full of booby traps. And for some people, the line is so long that it makes it where it’s almost a joke to tell someone they need to do it the right way. And granted, I’m an attorney. I believe in the rule of law. We help clients navigate the system legally. I’m definitely never suggesting anything otherwise but to tell someone who’s lived here in the United States for the better part of 20 or 30 years that they need to wait for their kids’ petition to be current, which is another 20 years from now, so that their kid can move here, and their kids 21 years old like that’s just not going to happen, that family is never going to be reunified. Most people don’t move countries when they’re in their 40s and completely uproot their lives. You need to accept the fact that you’re just going to be separated, most likely. And that is a really hard truth for people. Where, if that same family were from a different country, the process could take a matter of three or four years, but our Mexican neighbors, our Chinese neighbors, Indian nationals, Filipinos, face this extremely long line when they’re going through the immigration process, regardless of whether it’s through family and regardless of whether it’s through their employer, the lines can be decades long, and so to think that it’s just you need to go out and come back in like it’s monopoly. You don’t pass go, you don’t collect $200 try again is really an oversimplification of the process.
Rosaria Cain 04:54
Are you speaking about self deportation?
Hillary Walsh 04:57
No, I think that people have an idea that you can just go back to Mexico and come back in legally, and that it’s just not a big deal like it would be for us leaving the country, driving around the flagpole and reentering, that seems to be the belief of how simple the immigration process is, and it couldn’t be farther from the truth. It’s so complicated that I’ve been an immigration lawyer since 2012 and every day I have to look up and make sure that the law is still what the law was yesterday. And that’s true almost regardless of who the president is. It’s not even just because of the chaos that the Trump administration brings to immigration. So it’s a very, very complicated system that holds families ability to be together in jeopardy. And I promise, when you got moms and you got dads who are separated from their kids, the rules matter less because of the value that they place on being with their families. And I think all of us can empathize with that.
Rosaria Cain 05:59
Well, how long does it take to get into this country when you’re starting from nothing and you’re you begin the immigration process?
Hillary Walsh 06:07
If you don’t have a family member here, then you need to have a very special skill to be able to come here, or have an employer who will petition for you and come here. And that process alone can take three or four years. But if you have a family member here, and I’m talking immediate family, mom, dad, brother, sister, kids or spouse, even that process can take a long time, like if you wanted to petition for a sibling, and let’s say your sibling was born in Mexico, and you’re a US citizen, that process will take 20 years period just for them to then be able to go to their green card interview. 20 years is a long time to wait in a line.
Rosaria Cain 06:50
You know that really surprises me. I’ve been trying to get a card for Italy, and I have initially or at some point, double citizenship, dual citizenship, and it would take three years because I have a descendant, a grandparent. Digital Nomad Visa. Six months of paperwork, which I thought was completely ridiculous, 100 documents, but this sounds like far more. Is this? Is this the longest wait in the world? Or how does this rank with other countries?
Hillary Walsh 07:25
The US is very difficult to immigrate to and also difficult to come visit. Like as a digital nomad, for example, we don’t have a digital nomad option, and for people who are listening who are like well, what is a digital nomad, that’s basically where I bring my laptop. I have a job here in the US, or have a company. I bring my laptop, and I’m going to work from Spain for the next year and a half.
Rosaria Cain 07:46
And be a taxable resident.
Hillary Walsh 07:48
Exactly pay taxes. I am loud and proud. I’m here. I’m not hiding or anything else. If you come to the US and do that, you are working without authorization as a tourist, and that is that can make you inadmissible later on, inadmissible being you wouldn’t be able to either come back potentially, or you would lose your ability to have a tourist visa and possibly not be able to get a green card later on, simply by working for a foreign company while you’re here in the US.
Rosaria Cain 08:18
Interesting
Hillary Walsh 08:19
If you come on a tourist visa.
Rosaria Cain 08:20
How long does the tourist visa buy you? Is it? Is it three months in a six month period?
Speaker 1 08:26
It depends on where you’re from. So we have preferred countries and we have everybody else, essentially. But if you’re from a preferred country, you just get in with your passport. You may have heard about this, like with Canadians, or for folks from the UK or from Australia, you can come. They just reinstated Argentina, which is very interesting, the relationship that we were forming with Argentina, but now Argentina, Argentinians can come in just with your passport. You’re on the-
Rosaria Cain 08:53
So no visa.
Hillary Walsh 08:54
No visa needed. You’re automatically allowed to come for six months. You cannot work here. You cannot intend to overstay your visa. Obviously, you have to come purely to be a tourist for that amount of time. You can’t go to school while you’re here. Well, it’s very, very restrictive, where all these other countries recognize that we’re in a new era in the world and allow you to do these other things in the US has not modernized in this way. Other folks like, let’s say you’re from, I don’t know, trying to think of countries that are not on the list. Let’s say you’re from anywhere in Africa and you want to come to the US. If you get a visa, it’s going to be for 90 days max.
Rosaria Cain 09:30
Is Mexico on the preferred list?
Hillary Walsh 09:32
No, it’s not. You have to get a tourist visa to come. And that’s what I think makes it so, so hard for folks. You have to apply for a visa. So even if you have family here, if I have a client right now who she’s in the detention center, she applied to enter lawfully, and her kid was dying, and it was a young child and had a brain tumor, the child ended up passing away, and the child was literally in the final stages of passing away, and she could not get in. They would not give her a visa, so she entered the attempted to enter the country illegally. I have so much empathy for someone in that situation. And she was imprisoned for 30 days. I went and visited her, and I mean, she’s just in shock at this point. She’s never done anything wrong in her life, and just did 30 days in the Florence prison, and is now at Eloy Detention Center, and they’re going to attempt to deport her. And what we’re all we’re trying to do is allow her to go to this kid’s funeral. That’s all that we’re trying to do at this point. And there are so few mechanisms to be able to allow people from Mexico in particular, to enter the country lawfully for a short amount of time and then be able to leave. And this highlights one of those situations where she asked the documentation was there, the clear need was there, and now we got her in our prison system.
Rosaria Cain 10:56
Well, let me get this straight, because maybe I didn’t understand this. She has a child that was in this country,
Hillary Walsh 11:02
A US citizen.
Rosaria Cain 11:03
And she was in Mexico,
Hillary Walsh 11:04
Yes.
Rosaria Cain 11:05
And her child was dying, and they didn’t let her in the country,
Hillary Walsh 11:08
Correct.
Rosaria Cain 11:11
That’s incredible.
Hillary Walsh 11:12
Went to the border, asked to come in, showed all the proof of, “Hey, I just need to come in. My kid’s about to die, has a brain tumor. Will you please? Like is in an emergency room setting right now, like in an ICU setting”, and they said, “No”, she was just right there in Douglas, and so she attempted to enter illegally, and they apprehended her when she did so, and sentenced her to a misdemeanor, 30 days in prison.
Rosaria Cain 11:38
That’s incredible.
Hillary Walsh 11:39
It is so sad.
Rosaria Cain 11:39
So those are the types of situations you see on a regular basis.
Hillary Walsh 11:43
They are. They’re situations like that, where, when you pull back the headline and you start to really look at the facts, you start to see like, What in the hell are we doing? This doesn’t make sense. Because if I wanted to, I could spin this person. I could spin this whole story is this is a criminal who ignores our immigration laws. And you can go on and on and on, and it’s like we can tell there’s a story.
Rosaria Cain 12:08
There’s a backstory.
Hillary Walsh 12:09
The backstory matters. It matters to me. I mean, I think to some people, it doesn’t matter, because they’re much more black and white thinkers. Those facts really are relevant to me when I assess, is this person really a criminal, or is this person motivated by something that I can really understand, like, if there’s an emergency situation and someone’s going 75 miles an hour in a 55. They’re speeding, and they’re breaking the law, and that’s a crime in Arizona, because going over 15 miles an hour over the speed limit is criminal speeding. Does that make them a criminal? Or does that does the underlying reason for going 75 and a 55 matter? The underlying reason matters to me.
Rosaria Cain 12:49
It’s very interesting. They’re making those decisions,
Hillary Walsh 12:51
And it is folks at the border who are making those decisions, like just CBP [Customs and Border Patrol] officers, folks who do a very important job. Don’t get me wrong. I want CBP, and I want our police and frankly, I think the ICE and those sorts of enforcement agencies, they exist for a reason, but training is really important too.
Rosaria Cain 13:13
Wow. Let me just think about that for a second. That’s really incredible. How long has this been going? I imagine it coincides with the recent administration. Or has it always been that way to some degree?
Hillary Walsh 13:27
To some degree, it’s always been this way. So when you don’t have like as a Mexican national, you can come in the country in a very few number of ways. Work visa, so someone has, you know, petitioned for you, you’re going to come in and you’re going to work. Family based petition. Someone petitioned for you. You got a green card now you can come in. Tourist visa. Maybe you’re going to come as a tourist or maybe you got a conference that you’re going to go to. You can go to that conference. But outside of that there’s very, very little that you can do to come in under an emergency circumstance. We have something called parole, which sounds like what we think of from prison, and it is the same type of thought process where it’s like, “I’m going to allow you to do this just for a little bit of time, but if you screw up, there’s big consequences”, and that is, essentially, you’re at the border. I’m going to let you in for this humanitarian, humanitarian reason. But if you don’t leave when you’re supposed to, you’re going to have significant consequences. We’re going to put you in removal proceedings, etc. In this administration, we just see no one getting the permission slip based on humanitarian reasons. Everyone’s just being told, “No, you can’t come in”, no matter how bad the situation is.
Rosaria Cain 14:45
Do you see any change afoot in the near future?
Hillary Walsh 14:49
I think so. I really believe that we’re in the civil rights era for immigration law, and I think no one would look back and be like, “Wow, I wish I could have been African American and lived through the Civil Rights era”. I don’t think anyone, I mean, I don’t know. I’ve never been a black woman, but I would imagine that no one really wants to go back and relive that, but they’re happy that it happened, because it brought a lot of important change to our country that we still need to build on, quite frankly. But here we are, and we’re in our own civil rights era for immigration law, and no one really wants to live through it, but here we are, and we’re living through it. And I’m enco uraged by that. I really think that we have to. The pendulum keeps swinging with every administration. We need to get people who are bought in and ready to talk about this. It was funny. I was in Washington talking to, at the time he was running for Senate, Ruben Gallego, he’s running for Senate. He had not been elected yet. And I met with Senator Kelly, and I also met with what we thought was going to be, you know, the president Kamala Harris’ economics team, and I was there to talk about immigration, like, how are we going to position and talk about immigration after this presidential election? Well, everyone said that immigration is like the third rail. We’re just not going to talk about it. It used to be abortion, but we’re not going to talk about immigration. And then Trump had been very vocal about immigration, and had a lot of hard hitting aspects in his campaign about it. And here we are. Some of that is, some of that rhetoric is being played out like in a super sized kind of way. Finally, we don’t have to hide from the conversation on immigration like a politician, it’s not, it’s not a death sentence for their political career if they talk about immigration. In fact, it’s expected. So a lot of crap is going on, and a lot of sad, sad things are happening. Like, I have a client who she’s Guatemalan, was here going through the process legally, and ended up getting deported with her 18 month old, US citizen baby, and I’m trying to fight to get him brought back, because US citizens shouldn’t be deported. So a lot of things like that are happening, and the recovery process from a lot of this stuff is going to take a long time. I still wonder about the people who were in CECOT, the famous prison in El Salvador where we saw Mr. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, get taken and he was removed from there. But what about all the other people who were, you know, put in there? There. There’s not a whole lot of reporting going on about I know some of them were eventually taken to Venezuela, but what happened to the rest of them. These are people who are living in in what could be described as Hell on Earth. But I say all that to say like I really, really have hope that something good is going to come from all of this. I believe that that’s how change comes.
Rosaria Cain 17:59
Do you think we’re seeing a little change this week, because it seems like some things are happening in Washington that are at least for Minneapolis, and we’re seeing some shifts. Do you see that maybe being part of something that’s going to move across the country and become policy? Or do you think it’s a short term PR Band Aid?
Hillary Walsh 18:20
I think it’s short term. As long as Stephen Miller has a seat at the table, then this is going to be the stuff that continues. Because we even saw for a little while Trump’s often on his position about hotel workers and farm workers, and he was like, “These are good folks. What are we doing?” And it’s almost like the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing, because these are the same people that they were going out and doing raids and trying to pick the same demographic of people up. And farmers were like, “What the hell is going on?” These are the people who we need to be able to run our farms and our ranches, and you’re coming and picking them up. He’s like, “Oh, we need to create a program for them”. But then nothing came of that. It was just all lip service. That’s because, behind the scenes, it’s pretty obvious that Stephen Miller is driving the car, and as long as he’s got that seat in that authority, we’re going to continue to see a lot of this stuff come to pass.
Rosaria Cain 19:17
Well, the President has a history of firing a lot of people. So maybe, he’ll be next
Hillary Walsh 19:25
Yeah, It feels very maybe I’m just if it would be too good to be true. But I don’t know, it seems hard to imagine. It seems like Bovino took the fall for a lot of this, from a PR perspective, and they’ve sent him back to El Centro. And we’ll see what happens from there, but I don’t know. I think that the the person calling the shots remains the person calling the shots. And it’s not Trump, it’s Stephen Miller.
Rosaria Cain 19:53
So I imagine business is brisk at New Frontier.
Hillary Walsh 19:59
Business is very chaotic. It’s such an interesting time, because you have people who are paralyzed by fear, and I don’t blame them. I can’t even look someone straight in the eye and tell them “I know exactly how this is going to go”, and I’ve been doing this for however long that I’ve been doing this, you have to let people know that everything is subject to change. These are the likely outcomes, of what we’re going to do. But a large part of my job right now is helping people dial into faith. I really think that the two antidotes for fear are faith so you can try to have some certainty there and in taking action because when we find ourselves and as business owners and as parents and whatever it is, when we find ourselves really in a fierce world, taking action helps you get a little bit out of the downward spiral. But faith really is, how folks can you know, what is, what is the point of my life? What is the point of my existence? Is it to live in this type of fear? I don’t think that it is. And so this is forcing us to make difficult decisions about what we want to do with our lives, and a lot of folks are still choosing to file petitions and trust that the government’s going to process them the way that they’ve promised to.
Rosaria Cain 21:26
what’s the biggest challenge that you’re having with your firm in handling the amount of cases, the types of cases that you and your team are dealing with?
Hillary Walsh 21:39
I think this is true in any company right now, but in general, the customer expects a higher level of quality and not necessarily a higher price. And meeting those expectations, setting expectations, communicating, while also trying to incorporate technology and the challenges that that can bring, just with all of us trying to learn as we go, I think really marrying the customer expectation and the experience you want them to have while you have a very, very stressed out demographic is is a big challenge.
Rosaria Cain 22:18
How’s your team handling it?
Hillary Walsh 22:20
They’re doing great. Our team is fantastic. I’m so proud of them, and they rise to the challenge. Everyone feels a little bit demoralized. I think it’s hard to even we have really big victories. You celebrate those for about 90 seconds, and then you’re like, “Okay, next person”, because we know that there’s enough people that need our undivided attention, and it can feel very demoralizing, but they have a great attitude. Every day is a new day. Thank you God for this new day, because I needed it, and we just keep on trucking. So we’re one year into it, and it feels a little bit like the pandemic all over again.
Rosaria Cain 23:01
Yeah, the pandemic was a pretty long
Hillary Walsh 23:04
it was a long stretch. It was a really long stretch.
Rosaria Cain 23:07
Yeah. Well, how did you get here? Tell me a little bit about your history, and I know you grew up in Kansas,
Hillary Walsh 23:14
Yeah, I’m a Kansas girl.
Rosaria Cain 23:15
How did you get where you are now in terms of your career? What made you?
Hillary Walsh 23:20
What made me me? So many things. That’s the like, it’s, um, what’s the secret ingredient sometimes is maybe the easier thing to talk about. But I think that being a military spouse helped a lot. From the time I was 20 years old, I was living overseas. We lived in very, very rural Asia, which was such a cool experience. I’m about to go on a cruise with some of my girlfriends who I met while living in Asia. There are other American military spouses, and I haven’t seen them in almost two decades now, but we were next door neighbors when we lived in in Japan, and so, like, it’s so fun to have those really, really close bonding, lifelong friendships made while being in an environment, in a culture, that was so different than rural Kansas, which is, I mean, I went from like, wheat fields to rice patties, and there’s similarities, but a lot of differences. And that was a great shell shocking experience, culture shocking experience for me to start out with. But while my husband was deployed, he was in Operation Iraqi Freedom, I didn’t really have anywhere to go, because I didn’t want to go back home to Kansas and kind of just hang out. All of my friends, all the military wives, kind of scattered, and they went back home, they went on trips, they did all sorts of things. And I decided to go to Uganda and volunteer. I thought I would go help people, when, in fact, they ended up helping me, find me, and I worked at an orphanage, volunteered at an orphanage for several months, and it was a really life changing experience for me. It’s where I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. I had toyed with the idea, mostly because I thought that it just sounded cool. I was finishing my undergrad. I was getting a political science degree. Like, what do you even do with a political science degree anymore? I have no idea. I was like, oh, maybe I’ll go to law school. And I said that enough times that I kind of started to think that I would. But while I was there, I was like, wow, there’s a lot that I can do, from an international human rights perspective that can help people. I met children who were living on the street. They’re street boys who had fled internal conflict in northern Uganda, I met women who had experienced sexual violence as a form of warfare. I met lots of little babies who had HIV and their parents had passed away. Some of them were infants. I mean, just a huge eye opening experience for me as a true kid from from rural Kansas who had just never seen anything like that before. And that’s where I decided to go to law school. And then my first case as a law student, kind of working in our clinic, was for a young girl. She was 14, from Germany, was undocumented, and she had been kidnapped and prostituted on the Las Vegas Strip. I was going to law school in Las Vegas, and these were major casinos. And if you’ve ever walked through the casinos in Vegas, you know that they have all I mean, those places are video cameraed up like the dickens. So, you look at the casinos differently when you know that a 14 year old girl was able to get in and out of there regularly, and no one said anything, and they just turned a blind eye to it, and these were major casinos. Anyway, I went and met with her in Nashville at a Recovery Center for child human trafficking victims. That was my very first case to work on as a law student, and I was hooked. Her mom had been a flight attendant, and I can never say the airline. I’ve told this story, and I every time Lufthansa, you know, like, it’s not in business anymore, I don’t think, but it’s like, Yeah, something like that?
Rosaria Cain 27:24
German.
Hillary Walsh 27:24
German. Exactly. This is where the this is where the Redneck in me still comes out.
Rosaria Cain 27:28
Yeah, it’s a tough language. I can’t do German.
Hillary Walsh 27:31
But she had been a flight attendant on that airline, and they had come over, like, on a family like, the family pass, and they stayed and they overstayed, and this was when she was very little, and then all of these things happened to her as a teenager. Their story was like something from a really, really, really scary movie, and I was able to help them navigate this and get their papers. And I mean, I lost touch with her, but I made a difference in this little family’s life while I was just a law student, and that’s where the immigration law
Rosaria Cain 28:11
It’s where you got hooked.
Hillary Walsh 28:12
I mean, I was hooked. It was like I was doing SVU stuff, but it was real. And then I get to do this cool work every day, and I get to work with people from all over the world. I’ll talk to someone from Ethiopia during one consultation, and someone from Colombia, and another conversation
Rosaria Cain 28:31
So it’s not just all Mexico.
Hillary Walsh 28:32
Oh, no, no,
Rosaria Cain 28:33
Because, you know, you just think it is because we’re just north of there.
Hillary Walsh 28:36
Yeah, I have Filipino clients. Everybody’s got, I got some bougie Australian clients who, they’ve got issues. And I mean, everybody runs into little snags here and there, and it’s the primary- The reason we are we have so many undocumented Mexicans is because once upon a time, we used to allow folks to come over and work and then leave and everything else, and there was no big deal. And then, when Clinton was President, created all these new immigration laws that created all these immigration consequences.
Rosaria Cain 29:09
That started with President Bill Clinton?
Hillary Walsh 29:11
Started with Bill Clinton. I know it’s always surprising,
Rosaria Cain 29:14
And I don’t know why it does surprise me.
Hillary Walsh 29:16
Yeah, it was right after. It was right after the World Trade Center bombing, a lot of immigration reform came out of that.
Rosaria Cain 29:25
George W Bush, right?
Hillary Walsh 29:27
No, that is, the Twin Towers.
Rosaria Cain 29:30
oh, that’s the second time.
Hillary Walsh 29:32
I’m talking that DHL van
Rosaria Cain 29:34
at the bottom of the garage, in the garage,
Hillary Walsh 29:36
A lot of that came out of the mid 90s. In the wake of all of that,
Rosaria Cain 29:41
I forgot about that. Isn’t that crazy?
Hillary Walsh 29:43
I know we had so many things like it that we’ve forgotten about it. That’s, that’s what’s crazy.
Rosaria Cain 29:48
Well, it didn’t quite succeed.
Hillary Walsh 29:50
No, yeah, I know, but the DHL branding, unfortunately, mentally did. In any event, that’s the last time we had. Meaningful immigration reform, and it impacted Mexicans the most, and that’s why we have so many undocumented Mexicans today who are like, I’ve been here since the 80s and 90s, and now I’m undocumented and I’m stuck. What do I do? And most folks just want to go home and see their parents or visit their parents’ graves to say goodbye. They’re deprived of these human experiences that I think we can’t imagine, not being able to travel home and take care of our dying parent, and they can’t, because they would have to leave their children here and their grandchildren and their whole life that they’ve built here, and it’s all because of these very specific immigration laws that were created in the 90s
Rosaria Cain 30:42
After they got here.
Hillary Walsh 30:43
After they got most people after they got here. Yeah, yeah. So it is. We think about undocumented Mexicans as the stereotype, but I have so many clients from all over the world, and not everybody’s undocumented. There are lots of people who are going through the process. I have a girlfriend from law school who married a gentleman from the Middle East. The process took so long, and they were separated for so much of this time because we couldn’t get him here. We had to go through the process separately that they ended up getting a divorce. It was just too much, too long. The relationship like died on the vine, essentially, and there were other complicating factors. But had they been together, any relationship that starved out like that? It’s going to be really, really hard to keep it together. I know I have dealt with deployments and and those were only six months at a time, and I knew when they were going to end.
Hillary Walsh 31:40
Only six months.
Hillary Walsh 31:41
Yeah. Well, for immigration, it can be two, three years, yeah, and you don’t know when it’s gonna end. So it’s not like there’s just a date where, after this spell of time, this is when we’re gonna be good to go.
Rosaria Cain 31:52
Start marking it on the calendar.
Hillary Walsh 31:53
No, there’s nothing like that. And it’s tough for people.
Rosaria Cain 31:58
Well, you’re an attorney, you’re also an entrepreneur. How did you how did you make the leap into having your own practice?
Hillary Walsh 32:06
It was not intentional by any means. So I couldn’t get a job at the at the nonprofit that I wanted to work at because I didn’t have sufficient Spanish speaking skills, and they needed someone full up and looking back like I can absolutely see why. It was nothing personal. It was just literally I need to be able to talk to clients in the detention center in Spanish, and you cannot do that, and I didn’t want to go work somewhere where they were going to tell me what cases I could take and couldn’t take. I had done a lot of pro bono work for the few years that I had lived overseas, so I kind of become my own boss, but I was working for everybody for free. one of my friends, still good friend to this day, encouraged me, “You should start your own firm”. And I thought, “Okay, I’ll start a firm, and I’ll hire a translator, and we’ll go from there”. And now we have, like, over 150 staff members six and a half years later. So it was not intentional.
Rosaria Cain 33:03
How’s your Spanish?
Hillary Walsh 33:04
Much better. A couple of weeks ago, I did an hour radio show all in Spanish. I had to look up some things. I had ChatGPT, with me as my my crutch.
Rosaria Cain 33:17
I love having a translator for when I get nervous.
Hillary Walsh 33:19
Yes.
Rosaria Cain 33:20
because it everything can just go in a second.
Hillary Walsh 33:22
I mean, I was drained after that. I was really drained after it, like I had had a baby or something. I was that tired afterwards.
Rosaria Cain 33:29
It’s really, really difficult,
Hillary Walsh 33:31
Yeah, but I did it, and it was one of those things where I was like, Okay, I did it. I don’t want to do that every week. So I asked some of my team members who were native speakers, can you please do this radio show every week. But you know, so that that just shows that with time and plenty of Spanish classes, you can get there.
Rosaria Cain 33:47
Oh, I’ve been there. I totally understand. So what do you like about being in charge, so you’re obviously in control of the variables that your your firm sets forth. How do you create the right atmosphere for your people? How do you like being the being in charge and walking through all the different because there’s a lot of challenges with being, you know, the director of your firm.
Hillary Walsh 34:19
I sometimes I don’t, I mean, I in general, don’t particularly enjoy being the boss I hear you. I actually really love I was listening to Tony Robbins, and he calls it a tape. So, you know, it’s an old Tony Robbins, but he it’s, it’s all evergreen. He was talking about how some people are entrepreneurs and some are artists, and they own their own business. Some people truly are. They’re like, they’re going to scale the business to sell it. And those are people who are much more pure entrepreneurs. And I am not that. I thought, yeah, I am an artist, my craft and being an attorney and writing a really good brief and making a really good argument, and explaining things to people so that it’s something that’s understandable. All of those are pieces of art for me, and I really enjoy that aspect of it. Then you have HR and you have dress code violations and other stuff, and people who are real salty if you let them go, like all sorts of stuff. Those are more complicated. I was talking to a friend before I came in for the podcast, and she said, “At the end of the day, people are always people-ing. There’s only so much you can do when people be people-ing”. And it was like, Yeah, that’s true. Like, I just have to do my best and of course correct if I make mistakes, but the people aspect of the business make it. They are the magic, but they also are the most important ingredient to nurture, and that takes a lot.
Rosaria Cain 35:52
It does.
Hillary Walsh 35:53
It takes a lot.
Rosaria Cain 35:54
What do you see yourself doing? I’ll say, 10 years from now. What do you see yourself doing?
Hillary Walsh 35:59
Hopefully having, hopefully my face is still propped up by the same amount of Botox, or, you know, equivalent, because at this point, that’s how I feel, like I’m just keeping it together. But I think that my kids will be… in 10 years, my twins will be 22 which is hard to believe. My little guy will be 18. I will be becoming an empty nester, and I’m excited for that. Like, I love my kids being the ages that they are, and I really enjoy them, but I think it will be really fun to go visit them at college and, you know, and kind of be able to see the world again. And that will be a whole other chapter in my life, that for about eight years I was married and we didn’t have any kids, so we got this really great chapter, and then now we have the chapter of lots of kids. I had four kids in four years, so it was, like, very intense.
Rosaria Cain 36:55
Well, twins will do that.
Hillary Walsh 36:55
Twins will do that.
Rosaria Cain 36:56
I have twins.
Hillary Walsh 36:57
Yeah, you pump them out.
Rosaria Cain 36:59
Yeah.
Hillary Walsh 36:59
You know, when you go in,
Rosaria Cain 37:00
Get two for the price of one.
Hillary Walsh 37:01
You scale your pregnancy. Yes, exactly. And then we’ll have this other chapter where it’s like we get to be the adult friends of our kids and see if our experiment worked or not.
Rosaria Cain 37:17
I have to tell you, Hillary empty nesting is a blast. I am all about it. That’s probably a whole nother podcast, but love it. So is it harder than you expected to have your own firm, or is it about what you expected?
Hillary Walsh 37:33
It’s way harder. People talk about having it’s harder because of the personal development that it demands. So you have to constantly improve as an individual, learn to take less and less things personally, learn a whole other level of excellence, all of these things all the time. And it is like the most intense personal development program you could ever sign yourself up for and you have all these people to bear witness of it, and you’re accountable to them. Those are your employees and your customers, and you’re very accountable to them.
Rosaria Cain 38:10
And you’re always on the clock.
Hillary Walsh 38:12
Yes, absolutely, yeah. I had clients who got detained the day before Christmas and needed phone calls on the day of Christmas, and you just do what you got to do. Because that is, that is, I don’t know, I guess if I weren’t so into it, I would just let it go. But I’m really, I’m invested.
Rosaria Cain 38:30
I’ve never had a time of vacation since I’ve started my business, 26 years. I mean, I bring it with me, yeah? So I go places, but I bring it with me, and then I just work as I go.
Hillary Walsh 38:41
Yeah, I like cruises because I don’t buy the internet package. And I just tell people, literally, you will not be able to get a hold of me.
Rosaria Cain 38:48
Sorry. I’m at sea.
Hillary Walsh 38:50
I’m at sea, but if I go anywhere else, I will end up working. And even if it’s just 48 hours, it’s really nice to be unreachable.
Rosaria Cain 39:01
Unconnected.
Hillary Walsh 39:03
Yeah, yeah. I don’t buy the internet package, even on those really shorty ones.
Rosaria Cain 39:06
Smart. On airplanes?
Hillary Walsh 39:08
I will work. I love working on airplanes. Actually, I can get a lot done. If they’re distraction, yeah, I just, I grind it out. Someone’s feeding me the toilets right there. I can just get so much done. So I actually really love working on planes.
Rosaria Cain 39:21
Last question, what one fact that you haven’t told me today would surprise people.
Hillary Walsh 39:31
I don’t know. I feel like I’m not a very surprising person. But one time I once upon a time, I was in Malaysia, and this is my, like, two truths and a lie. So it is kind of, it’s, it’s a fun one. I was in Malaysia with a couple of my girlfriends while our husbands were deployed, and we somehow got called into this back area of a bar. And Malaysia is a Muslim country, and so, like, there are bars and stuff. It’s. Like, when we went to Morocco, you had to, like, go behind all these shady places in order to get a bottle of wine. So we found ourselves in a bar, and there was a one way glass room, which, when you’re out in the bar, you wouldn’t even notice. But we get called back, and one of the princes of Malaysia is knocking back expensive champagne and all this other stuff in this one way mirror room, the one way glass.
Rosaria Cain 40:28
So how did he could see the bar, but people in the bar couldn’t see him,
Hillary Walsh 40:33
And we had a great time while we’re there, there’s this gal from St. Louis who is performing as the live entertainment, and I start talking crap to the prince of Malaysia about how I could sing better than this lady. So this was alcohol induced shit talking.
Rosaria Cain 40:49
Yeah, but you remember it.
Hillary Walsh 40:51
I do. And I went up and sang, and I did a really good job, and that’s the time that I sang “I Will Survive” for the Prince of Malaysia.
Rosaria Cain 40:58
That’s great. That is a pretty incredible story.
Hillary Walsh 41:01
It’s a fun- it’s a it was a really good time.
Rosaria Cain 41:04
Well, I think that’s all we have time for today. And I think that wraps up a really nice talk with you.
Rosaria Cain 41:10
Thanks for having me.
Rosaria Cain 41:11
Thanks for spending time.