Managing Partner
Michael Wildes
Biography
Michael Wildes is the Managing Partner of Wildes & Weinberg, P.C., the premier boutique immigration law firm founded by his father, Leon Wildes, in 1960.
For more than 65 years, the firm has served a distinguished clientele. Michael has personally represented Yoko Ono, First Lady Melania Trump, Sarah Brightman, Lionel Richie, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, Sinéad O'Connor, Boy George, former Miss Universe winners, soccer icon Pelé, and Master Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten — among many others. Yet he treats every client with the same respect and fights for their rights with the same tenacity, regardless of their notoriety.
Michael served as a Federal Prosecutor with the United States Attorney's Office in Brooklyn from 1989 to 1993. He has testified on Capitol Hill on anti-terrorism immigration legislation and is a frequent legal commentator on Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and beyond. President Reagan appointed him to the District Appeals Board of the Selective Service System for New York, where he served for twenty years.
He currently serves as Immigration Counsel to Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and to Yeshiva University. In 2018 he published “Safe Haven in America: Battles to Open the Golden Door” through the American Bar Association. He has taught Business Immigration Law as an Adjunct Professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law for more than fifteen years, where he inaugurated an externship program for law students, and he guest-lectures at Yale, Columbia, NYU and Brooklyn Law School.
A lifelong public servant, Michael served as an Auxiliary Police Officer with the NYPD and is a decades-long EMT with Hatzolah Ambulance Service. He is in his fifth term as Mayor of Englewood, New Jersey.
“He treats all of his clients with the same respect and fights for their rights with tenacity — regardless of their notoriety.”
Author of “Safe Haven in America: Battles to Open the Golden Door” — published by the American Bar Association.