The Sports Visa Lawyer - Ksenia Maiorova

02/26/2025

Excited to report an EB-1A green card win for an elite beach volleyball player this week. Here's how he described our work: "I cannot express enough gratitude for everything you have done for me and my wife throughout this immigration journey. Receiving our green cards is truly a life-changing moment, and it would not have been possible without your expertise, dedication, and support."

These victories make the grueling process worthwhile. Congratulations to our client!

02/21/2025

Hey, immigration lawyers! Tired of grinding through low-profit, high-stress cases while others make easy money in sports immigration?

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April 10, 2025 @ 4:00 PM - Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico

01/02/2025

It's been a great couple of weeks for our Olympians! Our holiday season approvals include:

- P-1A visa issued to an Olympic medalist equestrian athlete. This case had a slight complication due to a minor DUI charge, which we were able to overcome.

- EB-1A approved by USCIS for an Olympic medalist in rowing. This case was complicated by the fact that the applicant was moving into coaching, while continuing to row mostly on a recreational level.

- O-1 visa issued in the Bahamas to a young Olympic sprinter from Nigeria. Due to the unavailability of appointments in Lagos and Abuja, we had to process in a third country.

- O-1 visa issued in Jamaica to a sports massage and recovery therapist who has worked with some of the top sprinters in the world.

Are you ready to become our next success story? Call us at 407-705-3345.

05/06/2024

Congratulations to my client, Favour Ofili, on her Olympic qualification. It was such a joy to cheer her on in person at the World Relays in the Bahamas this weekend!

Olympic Ticket Punched 👊

Team Nigeria's 🇳🇬 4x100m quartet of Tiana Eyakpobeyan, Favour Ofili, Olayinka Olajide and Tima Godbless has just crossed the line with SB of 42.71s to win the 3rd heat of the qualifying round @ the . Team Switzerland 🇨🇭 got the last ticket remaining for this event with 42.75s for 2nd.

From Paradise to Paris...Congratulations 💯

04/19/2024

I'm not generally one for conspiracy theories, but I believe that it is the deliberate agenda of USCIS to disincentivize using attorneys.

Let me explain...

The recent government fee increase hit one category in particular very hard - individuals applying for family-based green cards. The filing fee for the standard family-based adjustment packet went from $1,760 (already an astronomically high figure) to over $3,000 on April 1. Median household income in the US is $77,000, with the annual essential expenses being around $73,000. This means that there is only $4,000 PER YEAR left for non-essential expenses. The government now wants 3/4ths of that to process paperwork that receives less than 5 hours of agency touch time total. With the new $3,000 government fee, the average American family simply cannot afford legal assistance with the process, which is much needed, given that US immigration law is second in complexity only to US tax law. All of this is just the first punch.

USCIS is one of the few federal agencies that still uses paper filings for at least some of their cases. Recently, USCIS has introduced an e-filing system, which would be great if it wasn't plagued with glitches and integrated with the technology attorneys use to fill out forms more efficiently and avoid data entry mistakes. But this is the real kicker with the online system: the platform rules state that paralegals cannot prepare drafts of forms to be filed in the system and cannot check case statuses for clients in the system - all that must be done by an attorney. Let's break down what that means for the consumer. Attorney time = your money. To make case production more efficient from a time and cost standpoint, attorneys have their paralegals draft forms and monitor case statuses. That is no longer allowed if the attorney uses the online system. I just filed the simplest form available on USCIS, the one to enter appearance on a pending case, Form G-28. With my Forms software, producing that form takes less than 30 seconds and it's done by my paralegal. Online, because I had to do manual data entry, it took me about 10 minutes. Now let's do the math. Thirty seconds of paralegal time at $150/hr. is $1.25. Even if the attorney charges in 6 min increments, it's $15. Now let's take 10 minutes of an attorney's time at a rate of say even $300/hr, which is probably average. You are now paying $50.

In sum, USCIS is now only charging you an outrageous amount of money to do their work (poorly & slowly), they are also taking away all the tools that allow your attorney to deliver services at an affordable rate.

Yes, most immigration attorneys bill at a flat rate, but if it takes them exponentially more time to do the work, your flat rate will go up to account for that.

So when your attorney tries to explain to you why they are encouraging you not to file online when a paper version is available, heed their advice. It's for your own good.

I, for one, will avoid using that system for as long as I can. If you need immigration help, let's do it together, efficiently, while we still can!

Ksenia Maiorova, Esq.
Partner, Green & Spiegel US
407-705-3345

04/12/2024

As an immigration attorney, advocacy for the clients I serve on a broader scale than just through representation is very important to me. This piece in the Rookie Wire, a division of USA Today Sports, features my insights on the immigration challenges of international student-athletes and how I am working to change the legal landscape to create more financial opportunities for the nearly 20,000 international student-athletes competing in the NCAA.

The WNBA invited 15 prospects to participate in person and of the 15, four are international athletes, which is roughly 27%.

04/03/2024

Happy to share another EB-1A victory today. This petition for an athlete was approved in just 5 days. Our client currently holds a P-1A visa and will continue to use that to travel in and out of the US while awaiting his final interview at the US embassy in his home country.

With the backlogs for travel authorization these days, a combination of an O-1 + EB-1 or a P-1 + EB-1 is critical for preserving the athlete's ability to travel internationally while we pursue their permanent resident status.

We provided evidence under the following criteria: Awards, Publications, Leading or Critical Role, Original Contribution, Salary/Remuneration and Exhibitions.

Another noteworthy thing about this case and other sports cases that we file is that we use athletic records to establish the original contributions criterion. With the right legal arguments and evidence, this works.

The petition was a heavy hitter at 898 pages total. A job done right!

03/13/2024

Hammer Time - EB-1A approval for a hammer thrower!

I am pleased to report that we have secured an EB-1A petition approval for a professional hammer thrower just 8 days after it was filed. Here are some details about the case:

Background: this is a client for whom we obtained P-1A status a couple of years ago, following a record-setting athletic career in the NCAA. He is ranked in the top 20 in the world in the hammer throw.

Criteria applied for: Awards, Memberships, Publications, Original Contribution, Salary/Remuneration, and Exhibitions.

Petition details: the petition consisted of 425 pages, which made this one of our thinner filings for an EB-1A.

01/17/2024

Love to see my client as the cover of this story! Who says tiny countries can’t be competitive?

The Grenada Athletic Association celebrated its centenary earlier this week, with 11 January 1924 inscribed in the annals of World Athletics as the day the island’s federation founded

09/20/2023

Another EB-1A victory today for our office: a triple jumper with no senior-level international medals was approved in just 6 days. We are slowly teaching USCIS to follow the law. National-level recognition is enough. And youth and junior awards do count (as they finally recognized in USCIS guidance that was issued while this case was pending)!

We presented the following criteria:
1. Awards
2. Publications
3. Memberships
4. High Remuneration
5. Display of work at artistic exhibitions

09/20/2023

As many of you know, last week USCIS issued some VERY helpful new guidance on EB-1A adjudications. And I'm doubly thrilled because it looks like they're borrowing language straight from my RFE responses!

Let's take the below excerpt from the new guidance on awards.
Now compare it with my response to an RFE submitted a few weeks prior to the guidance being issued:

"Fourth, the RFE makes the claim that USCIS does not consider awards won at the junior level to be nationally or internationally recognized because they “inherently exclude established professionals who have already achieved excellence.” This language is problematic for several reasons. First, the national or international recognition of a particular award comes from the field of endeavor, not from the opinion of a USCIS officer. Second, this restriction is found absolutely nowhere in applicable law. And finally, such reasoning has repeatedly been struck down by federal courts as arbitrary, capricious and in violation of the APA. See e.g., Eguchi v. Kelly, supra, overturning USCIS’s reasoning that a Rookie of the Year award was insufficient to meet this criterion because it was reserved for, in the opinion of the Service, “neophytes, excluding more experienced riders.” The court found that the Service could not rationally find that the Rookie of the Year award did not meet this criterion. In support of this already overturned reasoning, the RFE cites the Policy Manual, but conveniently leaves out the part of the text that is unhelpful to this attempt to discredit Ms. X’s junior- and youth- level awards. Specifically, the cited provision in the Appendix states in the relevant part, that the Service may consider “limitations on competitors (an award limited to competitors from a single institution, for example, may have little national or international significance).” The Agency’s own guidance suggests that institutional awards may not meet this criterion, but that argument hardly works for awards won by Ms. X at continental and world-level competitions organized by the international governing body of her sport, which is a member of the International Olympic Committee."

USCIS incorporates both my reasoning and reliance on Eguchi v. Kelly. Maybe it's a coincidence, maybe not. 😉

08/07/2023

Many thanks to Joseph Duarte of the Houston Chronicle for keeping the conversation going about the unequal access that international student-athletes have to NIL, and for reaching out to me for comment. While there is still no universal solution that can extend to ALL international athletes, athletes at a very high level of performance can potentially qualify for extraordinary ability visas such as O-1 and P-1. We even managed to get extraordinary ability green cards for some NCAA athletes. While the challenges in the NIL x Immigration landscape persist, we continue to be at the forefront of the issue with innovative solutions that have already proven to work!

International student-athletes aren't allowed to receive NIL money in the U.S. because of...