Foster LLP

Focus and practice areas

Foster LLP handles immigration law, and the site keeps that focus across every page. The firm has provided immigration services since 1973, according to its about page. That is a long run in a field where the rules change with each administration.

The listed work covers temporary U.S. work visas, permanent residence and green cards, citizenship and naturalization, employer immigration compliance, E-Verify and Form I-9 audits, EB-5 investor visas, and immigration litigation. The contact page also lists court, deportation and removal defense. In my opinion, that spread is unusual: business immigration and removal defense often sit in separate firms with separate cultures.

Who the firm says it works with

Foster LLP names employers, individuals, families, investors and startups as its clients. The employer side involves U.S. and global work authorization, employee sponsorship, visa programs and mobility compliance. The individual and family side involves visa applications, permanent residence and citizenship matters.

Both sides run on the same underlying system, though they feel different in practice. An employer sponsoring an engineer deals with labor certification timelines and prevailing wage determinations. A family petitioning for a parent deals with priority dates and consular interviews. A firm carrying both has to keep two sets of habits alive at once.

How the team is built

The attorneys page lists 28 attorneys. Named among them are Oxana Bowman, Delisa Bressler, Melissa Cantu, Ryan Chargois, Isaac Chavira, Helene Dang, Dana J. Delott, Sandra Dorsthorst, Corina Farias, Charles Foster, Todd Fowler and AB Hart.

Twenty-eight lawyers all working one area of law is a real depth of bench. Immigration splits into subfields that barely overlap: an H-1B cap filing and an EB-5 regional center investment share almost nothing procedurally. A roster that size allows for people who spend their days inside one of those subfields.

The site does not publish attorney biographies, titles, law schools or admission years. Prospective clients who want that background will need to ask during a first conversation.

Where the firm operates

The Houston office comes first on the contact page. There is a second Texas office in Austin. Consultations happen by phone and video as well.

Foster LLP also offers consultations by appointment in Edinburg, Mexico City, San Salvador, Beijing, Guangzhou and Ho Chi Minh City. Those locations track real migration corridors into Texas. Edinburg sits in the Rio Grande Valley. Mexico City and San Salvador are consular posts where U.S. immigrant visa interviews take place, and applicants often need counsel before they travel. The three Asian cities cover the employment and investor visa pipelines that feed into Houston's energy and medical sectors.

The firm states that it serves clients across the United States and worldwide. Immigration is federal law, so an attorney admitted in one state can generally represent a client on a federal immigration matter anywhere. That is why national reach is normal in this field, and why the appointment locations matter more than the office count.

What these matters usually involve

Some general process context helps in reading the service list. None of what follows is a claim about how Foster LLP handles any particular file.

Removal defense

Deportation and removal cases go before an immigration judge in the Executive Office for Immigration Review, part of the Justice Department rather than the regular federal courts. The government is represented by a trial attorney from ICE. Cases move through a master calendar hearing first, where pleadings to the charges are entered, then an individual hearing where evidence and testimony come in. Appeals go to the Board of Immigration Appeals. Timelines stretch for years in most immigration courts.

Employment-based petitions

Work visa petitions run through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and many employment-based green card cases start with a labor certification filed with the Department of Labor. Employers assemble job descriptions, wage data and recruitment records. Requests for evidence are common and carry hard deadlines. Some categories have annual caps and lotteries, which puts filing windows on a fixed calendar.

Compliance work

E-Verify and Form I-9 audits are employer-side matters that arrive as a notice of inspection, often with three business days to produce records. Penalties attach to paperwork errors even when every worker is authorized. Firms doing this work review personnel files, correct forms where correction is allowed, and respond to the government's findings.

Family petitions and citizenship

Family-based cases start with a petition establishing the relationship, then wait for a visa number if the category has one. Immediate relatives of U.S. citizens skip that queue. Naturalization applicants file after meeting residence and physical presence requirements, then sit for an interview covering English, civics and the application itself.

What the record shows

The evidence here is the firm's own site, and it is consistent. Foster LLP names 1973 as its starting point for immigration services, lists 28 attorneys, publishes two Texas offices, and describes a service range that runs across the main immigration categories plus employer compliance and litigation.

As a reviewer, the founding year and the roster size carry the most weight. A 1973 start means the firm has worked through the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, the 1996 reforms, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and the policy swings since. Institutional memory of that kind shapes how a firm reads a new rule.

What the site withholds is individual detail. Without published biographies, a reader cannot match a specific attorney to a specific subfield before making contact. That is a gap worth closing in a first call: asking which of the 28 handles the category at issue, and how many such matters that person has run.

Foster LLP presents itself through its practice list rather than through claims about outcomes, and there are no case results or awards on the pages our research covered. For a firm working in an area where results depend heavily on the government's discretion and the individual facts, that restraint reads as sound. The firm's Houston office anchors the operation, and immigration law has been its stated work since 1973.