May 18, 2026
Recently, MPA’s very own Ryan Wood ’96 appeared on CBS Sunday Morning with Ted Koppel in a segment about the more than 200 immigration judges who have been fired or forced out of the nation’s immigration courts over the past fourteen months, and the due process concerns that purge has created.
Ryan reached out to share his story and to answer some questions because, as he said, “His path to this work began at Mounds Park.”
“After graduating in 1996, I spent more than twenty years in federal service. I served as an Army judge advocate with a deployment to Iraq. I was an associate chief counsel at ICE. I was an assistant United States attorney in Minnesota. I was appointed a federal immigration judge, and I was later promoted to assistant chief immigration judge—supervising twenty judges and more than eighty staff across the Midwest, and serving as one of the primary trainers of the nation’s immigration judges at the Executive Office for Immigration Review.
In February 2025, I retired—not because I was ready to stop working, but because I had come to believe the most useful thing I could do was work from outside the system. What I was seeing on the bench, and what has since accelerated, convinced me that attorneys, employers, and organizations would need experienced counsel. The enforcement environment is unlike any this country has seen.
Later that year, I founded Emeriti Law PLLC with two other former immigration judges and senior EOIR officials. I am the firm’s principal founding partner. We are headquartered here in St. Paul, with offices in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. Our practice is national and boutique by design. We advise law firms, employers, and organizations on immigration risk, and we represent individuals in complex appellate and removal proceedings.”
When Ryan shared his story with us, we wondered about the following:
What has been most meaningful/most challenging about your transition from federal service to founding your own firm?
The most meaningful part of founding Emeriti Law has been the freedom to do the work I believe in, on my own terms, with colleagues that I deeply respect. The most challenging has been everything else. Becoming an entrepreneur after twenty years in federal service means navigating the laws of fifty states, building systems from scratch, and developing the business instincts that law school and government service don’t teach. It has been genuinely exciting—and genuinely humbling.
What advice would you offer current MPA students who are interested in law, public service, or advocacy work?
For current MPA students interested in law or public service—go. We still need the best and brightest in federal service, and we always will. There have been many moments in my career where I strongly disagreed with what the government was doing. That is normal. What matters is that smart, thoughtful people stay in those seats—in the military, in the civil service, and at the bar.
Are there particular experiences from your career that have stayed with you and continue to guide your work today?
On what stays with me—my guiding principle has always been simple—keep your head down, your chin up, and take care of your client. That sounds modest, but it has real teeth. It means you will sometimes go against the grain. You will irritate your supervisors. You may find yourself in uncomfortable positions. But if you are faithful to your client and faithful to the rules, you will come out ahead—and you will be able to live with yourself. That conviction has carried me from a JAG office in Iraq through my time at DOJ and into private practice. It still does.
We are always looking for more alumni stories to feature. We’d love to hear about your journey since graduating from MPA! Share your updates with us by emailing alumni@moundsparkacademy.org.
