Tejas is immigration counsel at Franczek Radelet P.C., leading the firm’s immigration practice and serving as a member of the Labor & Employment and Higher Education Practice Groups.
Tejas is committed to helping employers and individuals comply with the complex requirements of U.S. immigration law. As employers increasingly seek to hire and retain talented foreign national employees, he is committed to helping employers efficiently and economically sponsor workers for permanent residency through labor certifications and in multiple temporary visa categories, such as H-1B, O-1, E-2, R-1, E-3, and L-1. He services employers of all sizes who seek assistance with audits by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to ensure compliance with I-9 recordkeeping requirements and employers’ responsibility to verify their employees’ work authorization, preventative counseling and internal audits, and guidance to ensure compliance with evolving immigration rules, executive actions, and legislation. For start-up businesses and small business owners, Tejas has successfully worked with investors to secure work visas and permanent residency through the EB-5 program and represented store owners victimized by robberies to obtain legal crime victim status through “U” visas. He also represents individual foreign nationals in removal proceedings, family-based permanent residency and citizenship applications, and litigation in federal district courts and Courts of Appeals.
Tejas is actively involved with and has been appointed to leadership positions in many immigration-focused associations and bar associations. He served as the 2014 president of the Indian American Bar Association of Chicago. He is currently the co-chair of the South Asian Bar Association (SABA) of North America’s immigration committee, and, starting in mid-2015, he will become chair of the Illinois State Bar Association’s International and Immigration Law Section Council. He also previously chaired the New Members Division for the Chicago Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, served on the Customs and Border Patrol Liaison Committee, and the liaison committee to the local office of the USCIS, and was a member of the Board of Trustees for the SABA Foundation and the Associate Board of the Indo-American Center of Chicago. He volunteers extensively with pro bono agencies and chaired the “Cyriac Kappil” Indo-American Clinic for three years.
Before joining the Firm, Tejas was selected for a judicial clerkship with the Superior Court of St. Thomas and St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands and then practiced at two immigration-focused law firms in Chicago. He also previously clerked for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, focusing on employment discrimination claims, in Washington D.C. He speaks Hindi/Urdu, Gujarati, and French.