Rebecca Walters, Esq.
Rebecca Walters joined Wilkes Legal in March 2025 as a Senior Immigration Attorney. Ms. Walters has over twenty years of experience working in the field of immigration law.
Immediately prior to joining Wilkes Legal, Ms. Walters served as an Assistant Chief Immigration Judge with the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) of the United States Department of Justice. Ms. Walters was appointed in September 2021 to serve at the Annandale Immigration Court (formerly Arlington Immigration Court) and the Falls Church Immigration Adjudication Center. She regularly presided over master and merits hearings in removal (deportation) proceedings as an immigration judge, in addition to managing the Courts and supervising over thirty immigration judges, sixteen attorney advisors and judicial law clerks, and a staff of approximately one hundred court personnel. During her tenure with EOIR, Ms. Walters onboarded and trained over 100 new immigration judges, expanded EOIR’s local and regional pro bono representation efforts, increased legal access efforts for unrepresented respondents, and worked with the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), EOIR Legal Orientation Program (LOP) providers and programs, local law school clinics, and other stakeholders to create efficient court operations and ensure due process rights for all immigrant respondents. Additionally, Ms. Walters served as a member of the EOIR Pro Bono Steering Committee and Juvenile Services Subcommittee, providing recommendations and policy responses to EOIR leadership regarding initiatives and policies impacting unaccompanied immigration children in removal proceedings.
Prior to her service as an immigration judge, Ms. Walters spent over a decade providing direct legal representation to low-income immigrants, with a focus on serving vulnerable populations including domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking survivors, and unaccompanied immigrant children. From 2010 to 2012, Ms. Walters served as a Skadden Fellow at Ayuda, a non-profit organization based in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region. Through her Skadden fellowship, Ms. Walters implemented a Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault project at Ayuda’s Virginia office, providing direct immigration and family law services to immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and other violent crimes. She provided direct representation to immigrant clients in the Virginia Juvenile and Domestic Relations Courts, petitioning for civil protection orders, custody, child support, and divorce. Following her fellowship, Ms. Walters continued at Ayuda’s Virginia office as a Staff Attorney from 2012-2014, a Supervising Attorney from 2014-2019, and as Managing Attorney from 2019-2021. Throughout her tenure at Ayuda, Ms. Walters represented clients in immigration matters before U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and in removal proceedings before EOIR.
As an immigration attorney, Ms. Walters developed a specialized expertise in U and T visas, Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) self-petitions, and Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) cases, in addition to her broad general immigration practice. Ms. Walters has extensive experience representing both child and adult immigrant survivors of violence in Northern Virginia, with a focus on SIJS petitions in the counties of Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William, Arlington, and Alexandria. She served as a leader in presenting novel and complex SIJS cases before Northern Virginia courts starting in 2010, arguing for SIJS findings at both the Juvenile and Domestic Relations and the Circuit Courts. Ms. Walters served in various leadership positions in the Northern Virginia legal community, including on the Advisory Team for the Fairfax County Domestic Violence Action Center (DVAC), the Fairfax County Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team (DVFRT), and as a member of the Steering Committee and Keynote speaker for the Freedom Network. She was honored for her work at EOIR with a Director’s Award for her pro bono efforts in 2022 and received the Fairfax County Domestic Violence Provider of the Year Award in 2018, based upon her work with immigrant survivors of domestic violence.
Ms. Walters received her Juris Doctor and graduated summa cum laude from American University Washington College of Law in 2010 and obtained her Bachelor’s Degree in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia in 2005. From 2005 to 2007, she served as the Staff Assistant to the American Bar Association’s Commission on Immigration in Washington, DC, where she focused on due process rights for immigrants and refugees in the United States, standards for the treatment of unaccompanied immigrant children in the United States, and the monitoring and implementation of detention standards for immigration detention facilities throughout the United States.
Finally, Ms. Walters has served as an Adjunct Professor at the American University Washington College of Law since 2017 and enjoys staying involved with her local law school community. She has regularly participated as a guest lecturer, trainer, and panelist on topics of immigration law over the years, including at the Federal Bar Association (FBA), American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), and the Freedom Network Annual Conference among others. Ms. Walters is a member of the Virginia State Bar and she is admitted to federal practice before the Eastern District of Virginia. She is a native of southwest Virginia and she speaks Spanish and French.