We spent an emotional day with one of Atlanta’s top immigration attorneys. Here’s why he says the system doesn’t work.

In November 1986, when Atlanta-based immigration lawyer Charles H. Kuck was a first-year law student at Arizona State University, President Ronald Reagan signed what remains to this day the only major immigration reform measure ever passed by Congress. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (also known as the Reagan Amnesty Act) civilly and criminally penalized employers who knowingly hired undocumented workers. It also allowed 3 million immigrants already in the country to obtain legal status.

At the time, Arizona State offered a course in immigration law. But as Kuck told me when I visited him at his Sandy Springs office not long ago, he shrugged the course off then. Why take it?, he thought. They fixed the problem, right? It was for liberals and whackos.

But the 1986 law had only a short-lived and limited impact on addressing the country’s broken immigration system, and soon the laws regulating immigration that Kuck had ignored at Arizona State would become his top priority. His turning point came while he was working in his first job out of law school at a Phoenix law firm. A colleague, who knew Kuck spoke fluent Spanish, asked whether he would represent a Guatemalan farmer who had applied for asylum. Kuck agreed and won the case.

“It was life-changing for me,” Kuck says. “He had been chased out of Central America, had all these terrible things happen to him. I changed this guy’s life. It was a remarkable experience for me.”

Photograph by Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

Over the following two years, Kuck, now 62, took on seven pro bono asylum cases and won them all. He knew then that his future was in immigration law. He eventually moved to Atlanta after being recruited by a law firm as an immigration expert, something very few lawyers specialized in then. In 2003, he founded the Atlanta immigration law firm Kuck Baxter, which has become one of the most widely respected immigration law firms in the country, employing 47 people, including 12 attorneys.

Kuck has served as national president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and has won numerous honors, including the Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce 2025 Advocate of the Year. He’s also been named one of the top five immigration lawyers in the world by Chambers and Partners, a London-based independent research company that ranks and reviews the globe’s top lawyers and law firms, and is a current adjunct professor of law at Emory University and the University of Georgia.

With news of the Trump administration’s campaign of mass deportations making headlines every day, I wanted to see for myself what it was like to be on the front lines of the battle to stop the deportation of millions of immigrants from the United States. I asked Kuck if I could shadow him for a day as he helped clients navigate the perplexing maze of laws governing American immigration.

Photograph by Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images

When I arrived at his office early on a Monday morning, Kuck opened a spreadsheet on his computer to show me his schedule for the day. His workday started at 7 a.m., spanned more than 10 hours, and included consultations with 18 clients. “A typical day,” he told me. All of his sessions were conducted in Spanish, a language I don’t speak. Each case revealed something about the complications and convoluted rules and regulations inherent in our bewildering immigration system.

There was a woman from Mexico who had waited 24 years for her application for a green card to be processed and approved, even though her brother, a U.S. citizen, had sponsored her request when she first arrived in the United States. Kuck had good news for her: After checking her case number on the federal government’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website, Kuck told her that her application was at long last in a group at the top of the list for action. Kuck later explained that 24 years has become the standard waiting time to obtain a green card under the quota established for a person being sponsored by a sibling.

A woman from Colombia told Kuck she had come to the United States as a legal temporary visitor and had plans to marry her Colombian boyfriend, who is a U.S. citizen. Kuck cautioned the couple to wait at least 90 days before wedding. He told the hopeful bride that if they married sooner, she could be charged with fraud—the government would allege that the real purpose of her visit was to remain in the country through her marriage to a citizen. Kuck told her that if she didn’t wait, she could face deportation and a possible permanent bar from reentering the United States.

In a different case, Kuck could offer little solace to a young Guatemalan woman who came to the office with her husband. She’d arrived in the United States at age 16 and had immediately gone to the authorities seeking asylum. Because her lawyer at the time failed to file necessary paperwork, she’s subject to deportation. Kuck advised her that the only legal remedy was to go home to Guatemala and wait the eight years required by U.S. law before she could return to the United States and file for asylum. Perhaps, he said, his office could apply to have her wait time reduced to five years.

The woman grew increasingly distraught as Kuck explained her situation. As she reached out to hold her husband’s hand, I realized I didn’t need Kuck to translate that she’d received distressing news.

Later, Kuck reflected on that case. “My news wasn’t ‘You are never coming back.’ It’s that you’re going to have a time period before coming back. And some people take that differently from others. Some say, ‘I can come back? Great! I can do eight years!’

“But for most people, it’s ‘I can’t be apart from my husband,’ and the husband is wondering, ‘Am I going to go back and forth to Guatemala for eight years?’ It can cause divorce; it can cause family separation.”

Kuck had a similar conversation with a woman from Honduras who is now a U.S. citizen, but whose mother has overstayed her visa. He explained that her mother has a path to remain in the country legally because her daughter is a citizen, but that remedy doesn’t extend to the stepfather, who could be detained anytime. Another family, facing difficult decisions.

I asked him whether cases like this make him emotional. “I don’t cry anymore,” he said. “There are awful cases. I don’t think you can build a wall high enough to block out the emotions. If that happens to you, you should get out of this practice.”

Dustin Baxter, who is the firm’s managing partner, acknowledged the stress of disappointing clients. “I feel like there are a lot of consultations where we have to break really bad news to people and just help them through the emotions,” he said. “They’re finally coming to the realization there’s no future for them here. Their hopes for their kids are gone, their hopes of political freedom are gone, their hope of living in a safe country is gone.”

Kuck’s frustration with our immigration system began long before Donald Trump descended his golden escalator and began his advance toward the presidency and his war on undocumented immigrants. “There’s nothing about our immigration system that works,” he said. “It doesn’t work for deporting the right people, and it doesn’t work for getting the right people here. But this is all fixable. Congress can fix all of it tomorrow.”  Over the past 25 years, at least three bipartisan attempts at comprehensive reform have failed, victims of partisan politics.

Now, President Trump has taken reform completely off the table, threatening to deport millions of people who are in the country illegally. In the most recent crackdown, his policy adviser, Stephen Miller, ordered ICE agents to dramatically increase their number of daily arrests, sending agents into homes, retail stores, and restaurants to round up anyone, even those without criminal records. Kuck is contemptuous of Miller, whom he believes is motivated by pure bigotry.

“Trump once said if Stephen Miller had his way, there would be only 100 million people in this country and they would all look like Mr. Miller,” Kuck said, quoting a report by New York Times reporter Annie Karni.

Kuck is fighting back.

Photograph by Stephanie Eley

In April 2025 he won a temporary restraining order in federal court. He represented 133 international students, 33 of whom are living in Georgia, who were subject to deportation when the Trump administration began revoking visas for foreign students studying in the United States. The order forced the government to restore the visas. This past May, he added another 225 plaintiffs, whose visas were also restored.

At any given time, Kuck said his office is likely to be representing as many as two dozen or more individuals who are already in detention, some housed in what the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported to be overcrowded and inhumane conditions at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia.

Despite the dispiriting prospect of having to deliver bad news to some clients, and even in the face of the daunting challenge of fighting an administration determined to demonize and deport millions of immigrants, Kuck is surprisingly upbeat. His faith, no doubt, informs his outlook on life and work. A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he was required to perform missionary work, which he did in Peru. He told me, “It was through preaching the gospel in Peru that I learned to love people.”

Kuck is also inspired by his literary hero, Don Quixote, who is present in more than a dozen paintings, sculptures, and books that crowd his office and the lobby where clients wait for their consultations. Quixote, the protagonist of Miguel de Cervantes’s classic novel, imagines himself to be a knight-errant. He sets out to right wrongs and protect the helpless.

“For me, Quixote is a symbol that we have an obligation in our lives to challenge things that are bad,” Kuck told me. “Quixote’s visions were visions. They weren’t real dragons. But there are real dragons. To me, those who oppose immigration are kind of like the dragons that Quixote fought.”

Kuck paused for a moment and reflected on the long line of immigrants who seek his help every day. He told me they “require somebody who is not willing to give up.”

This article appears in our September 2025 issue.

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