Elisa Brasil
About
Elisa Brasil was born in the Azores, Portugal. She immigrated to the United States when she was a child and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Elisa is a native Portuguese speaker and speaks proficient Spanish. Elisa’s own experiences growing up in an immigrant community combined with her interest in other cultures naturally led to her desire to work closely with immigrants to represent them in the American judicial system.
Elisa attended college at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and law school at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law (now renamed University of California San Francisco Law). After a course in immigration law taught by Professor Richard Boswell Elisa was inspired to pursue a career in immigration law.
Elisa was an associate attorney at the Law Office of Kaiser and Capeci in San Francisco, California, where she gained experience litigating complex cases before the immigration courts, the Board of Immigration Appeals, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Elisa also represented clients before the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services in their matters related to Asylum, Naturalization, Adjustment of Status, and other applications for immigration benefits.
After eight years of gaining experience representing clients in immigration proceedings, Elisa founded The Law Offices of Elisa Brasil, where she continued to offer legal services in the immigration space from 2010 to 2023.
In April 2023, Elisa was appointed to the Immigration Court at San Francisco, California, where she served a two-year term as an Immigration Judge, presiding over a docket of over a thousand hearings and adjudicated Asylum, Withholding of Removal, Convention Against Torture, Cancellation of Removal, Adjustment of Status, and various waiver cases.
Elisa joined Landerholm Immigration in August 2025, where she conducts consultations, devises legal strategies for clients, and provides mentorship for attorneys, paralegals, and other staff.
Elisa lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, Brian, and her daughter, Isabel. When not working, Elisa enjoys international travel and discovering new places. On weekends Elisa enjoys walking in the woods, reading good books, and drinking good coffee. She is part of the Portuguese community in the Bay Area where she belongs to a cultural group and attends and participates in Portuguese cultural events.
Elisa believes in empowering immigrants to realize their dreams and looks forward to helping our clients achieve their goals and their version of the American Dream.