One immigration law lawyer likens practicing in the United States these days to trying to build an airplane mid-flight during a thunderstorm while someone shouts contradictory instructions from the cockpit.

With a federal bureaucracy seemingly hostile to almost every foreign-born petitioner seeking temporary or permanent residency, government rules that undergo frequent revision, and the glare of hyper-partisan political and social attention trained on immigration issues, few legal areas present practitioners and clients with more challenges than immigration law in America in 2026.

“I have clients who, in the past, would be nervous because dealing with the immigration system is always anxiety inducing,” said Danielle Huntley Webb, principal of Huntley PC in Boston. “It is about someone’s life. It is about their ability to live with their spouse and family in the United States and to work in the United States. It’s always a high-stakes situation.

“But the level of anxiety, fear, and paranoia to my clients has increased by 10-fold, I think, in the second Trump administration,” she added.

However, practitioners report that artificial intelligence tools generally represent a source of aid and comfort to immigration attorneys. Unlike many other areas of the law, where GenAI platforms are still in the test-drive stage and attorneys remain wary of the technology and its potential flaws, immigration attorneys seem to have embraced AI technology more than their colleagues and have regularly incorporated it into their work.

Growing usage and acceptance

The 2026 State of U.S. Immigration report from the legal and accounting business platform 8am said that about 40% of immigration attorneys reported using AI assistance in their practice each day, the highest of any legal specialty area.

The Federal Bar Association places AI usage by the immigration bar at 47%, outpacing its employment by civil litigants (36%), family law practitioners (26%), and trusts and estates lawyers (25%).

“The percent [of usage] is less than half, but the technology only began showing up less than five years ago,” said Charity Anastasio, senior counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association in Washington, D.C. “Lawyers are naturally slow to adopt new technologies, so that is lightning speed by standards of the legal profession.”

The digital program reviewer AIToolsBakery.com said the complexity of the different tasks that immigration lawyers have to deal with have allowed several AI products to gain popularity among practitioners, including Docketwise, Visalaw AI, CaseBlink, Drafty AI, Parley, and INS Zoom.

Immigration attorneys also report regular use of more general AI tools like ChatGPT, CoPilot and Gemini, lawyer surveys have shown, including a 2025 American Bar Association survey.

Anastasio said that over the past few years the AILA has focused on recognizing the potential usefulness of AI tools for an immigration law practice and making more training available to the group’s 18,000 members on the new technology, looking at both practical and ethical issues.

A blizzard of paperwork

The technical heart and soul of immigration practice is the proper filing of forms and applications with the U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS), the office within the federal Department of Homeland Security that handles visas (including H-1B and EB-1), work permits (EADs and I-766), naturalization status (N-400), asylum applications (I-589), green card adjustments, and refugee status determinations (RSD).

As the USCIS processes and then considers how to resolve applications, immigration attorneys frequently have to handle RFEs (Request for Evidence) or NOIDs (Notice of Intent to Deny), providing more documentation to support an application or to rebut a pending rejection of a visa, work permit, etc. Practitioners say they are receiving RFEs and NOIDS far more frequently in the second Trump administration than in the past.

Attorneys agree on two points: Delays in processing applications have become endemic in the system and denials of applications for those seeking various types of immigrant status are up across the board, although they say that accurate federal record-keeping is not available.

“The problem is that [USCIS] is behind on releasing the data,” Webb said. “We are seeing data from six months to a year ago. … We have so little information that we have to Crowdsource our information from colleagues. That’s the only way to get a really good way of understanding what the trends are and what is happening right now.”

Webb said she believes the paucity of current data about the immigration system and the seeming “hostility” of its administrators toward applicants are both intentional.

“The cruelty is the point,” she said.

Appetite for information

AI programs lend themselves well to a process so heavily dependent on the timely and proper preparation of federal paperwork and the documentation to support those applications, practitioners said.

Documents that used to take paralegals and other office staff hours to prepare and collate can be done much more quickly by AI programs designed specifically for the task, said Hannah F. Little, managing partner of the Garfinkel Immigration Law Firm in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Such tools are proving to be “enormously useful” for finding and organizing materials that are contained across a range of documentation and are needed for many kinds of immigration applications, according to Little.

But she said AI programs are less polished in producing petitions and other written materials that accompany federal applications. Lawyers must carefully supervise those stages of the process, she cautioned.

“We did have to reset expectations among staff and some of our associates, because it is not at the point where you hit a button and Voila! – it comes out on the other side and you do not have to do other work before it is a polished, finished product,” Little said.

Alka Bahal, partner and chair of Corporate Immigration Services in Parsippany, New Jersey, said she has found AI especially helpful when her cases deal with foreign documents, such as tax filings in other countries.

“AI has the advantage of not being restricted by language, so when it performs a search, it has a far wider reach than me as an individual,” she said. “It can scope out information from other countries quickly and easily, providing much needed context for documents, circumstances, etc., to explain a position or document in a visa filing.”

Bahal was among the immigration attorneys who said they hoped AI tools could help keep them better informed about the changes in an area of the law that is evolving more rapidly, perhaps, than any other in America.

“Immigration is a nuanced field,” she said. “There is a large body of information which influences the way the government adjudicates applications which isn’t [yet] readily available to AI, [including] much more beyond just the regulations and public notices.”

But In Bahal’s view, AI can’t be of much help in fixing this shortcoming unless the federal government becomes more forthcoming with timely information about its guidelines and regulations, which are frequently updated or altered, and the outcomes of its adjudicated cases.