Brittany Eileen Gilder

Attorney Brittany Gilder focuses her practice on areas where immigration and family law intersect. Brittany provides a holistic approach for understanding immigrant families’ legal needs that have never been seen before in Knox County.

“Family lawyers working with the immigrant community can be status sensitive or socially conscious in how we approach someone’s interests,” Brittany says. “Understanding the different ways to handle someone’s case with a perspective and background in immigration is key.”

For example, an immigrant navigating divorce may experience unique difficulties compared to a U.S. citizen in the same scenario. These difficulties may be due to communication barriers, or because they risk deportation of themselves or a family member when they become involved in the legal system. Brittany works to reduce those barriers to ensure everyone has equal access to legal services regardless of their immigration status.

Brittany became an attorney after witnessing first-hand the difficulties of traversing the immigration system in the U.S. “I was working as a general contractor for the United States Citizen and Immigration Services, and while I was there, I encountered a lot of people dealing with hardships within the immigration system, many of whom had been victims of fraud or worse,” Brittany says. “It was just something about wanting to help people in a vulnerable situation that really made me get into this line of work.”

This eventually led to her involvement in immigration cases involving asylum seekers, one of which she remembers vividly.

“We were representing a young girl that had been detained for her entry to the U.S.,” Brittany says. “She was seeking asylum because her family had been threatened by gangs in Guatemala, and she apart from the rest of her family had been detained and held in a federal detention center for approximately two years before I joined the case. We filed a Habeus Corpus Petition and got her released after two years of mistreatment in an ICE detention center. The feeling of reuniting somebody with their family is simply indescribable.”

Brittany is a native of Middlesboro, KY. She earned her J.D. from the Lincoln Memorial University Duncan School of Law in 2021.