Aaron P. Karnell is Senior Counsel at Lepore Taylor Fox. Prior to joining LTF, Aaron served as a Consular Officer in the U.S. Department of State for more than eleven years. His Foreign Service posts included Dar es Salaam, Gaborone, Guadalajara, Matamoros, Belfast, and his last assignment for the Department was a detail to U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Washington, DC. During his career in Foreign Service as a line officer and as Section Chief, he adjudicated thousands of nonimmigrant visa applications (including L-1, H-1B, O-1, B and F) and both family- and employment-based immigrant visa applications. From 2021 through 2023, Aaron practiced business immigration law at a global law firm based in Arlington, VA where he focused primarily on temporary and permanent visas for intracompany transferees and professionals. In 2023, he re-joined the Department of State as a Consular Affairs Specialist for the Office of the Coordinator for Afghanistan Relocation Efforts, where he facilitated the entry of our former Afghan allies to the United States as Special Immigrant Visa holders and refugees.
Aaron has made it his business to understand and apply every corner of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Code of Federal Regulations as applied by the State Department and USCIS, and the agency guidance and adjudication manuals which officers of those agencies rely on. He has served on the Department of State National Liaison Committee of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), through which he authored practice pointers, book chapters, and alerts, and answered numerous questions from fellow attorneys on State Department trends and practices. He is often sought after as a panelist at national conferences where consular trends and practices are discussed.
Aaron has dedicated his post-Foreign Service career to helping clients understand the State Department’s visa process, the visa interview experience, the way consular officers are trained and approach the law, and how all of this impacts their immigration journey.
Aaron became a member of the California Bar in 2014 and the Maryland Bar in 2020. Prior to joining the Department of State Foreign Service, he was a Democracy and Governance Officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development and an Asylum Officer for USCIS. In addition to holding a B.A. in Government, Aaron holds a J.D. and a Ph.D in Political Communication. He has two children and lives in Rockville, Maryland with his wife, Katy. In his free time, he likes to practice Buddhist meditation and go bike riding on one of the many beautiful cycling trails in the DC area.
