About Courtney
Biography
Biography
Hi there! My name is Courtney Han. I am an Associate Immigration Attorney here at Hope Immigration. I just recently joined the team in June 2025, but have been a lawyer for ten years, and have been practicing solely immigration for the past four years. I am so excited and honored to play a role in your immigration journey with the Hope and intention of providing safety, comfort, freedom, and a sense of community to you and your family. My top priorities are family unity, family reunification, and humane justice.
I was born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I lived until I left for college. My dad was an engineer, my mom was a mission travel agent, and I was one of five kids. I grew up loving school, church, and musical theater. I have vivid memories of begging my mom to give me never-ending pages and notebooks of handwritten math problems to entertain me while we were on family road trips in our big purple conversion van. (Google did not exist back then, so hand-written was the only option, sorry Mom.)
I was always very active and involved in the local Methodist Church. When I was in early high school, our Pastor Jay Minnick gave a sermon about “Radical Hospitality,” and for some reason, this idea resonated with me and became my life’s motto. I became known as a “scooper,” always reaching out to new or isolated people to ensure they feel seen and welcome. I tended to be the student who was giving tours and usually part of the welcome committee. I also spent a lot of meaningful time volunteering with Special Olympics with some of the coolest athletes around, especially my little brother.
After high school, I moved to Lexington, Kentucky for college. I earned my Bachelors Degree in mathematics from Transylvania University and then my Masters in Homeland Security from Morehead State University, all while living in the beautiful, southern, horse-farm-filled, friendly town of Lexington.
While I was working on my masters, I worked part time at my uncle’s law firm in Lexington, and somehow ended up taking the LSAT, “just for fun?” Well, my math brain did well with those logic games and I was offered a full scholarship to attend law school in Charlotte, North Carolina. I could not turn it down; off to law school I went. And good thing I did, because I met my husband there, on my first day of my first semester of law school! We were in the same cohort and as the semester went on, we became impressed with each other's work ethic. On our first date, we came in first place at the local trivia night, and have been inseparable ever since. Together, we set off on our path to become attorneys and humans who use our legal brains to try to positively impact the world around us. After he asked me to be his date to the Law School Prom, the rest, as they say, was history. We are now married and have two beautiful children who are our pride and joy.
After law school, we moved back to Lexington, Kentucky, passed the bar to receive our Bar Licenses, and got married at a castle(!). It was, in fact, quite the fairy tale. After 8 years of practicing law in Lexington, my husband received the job offer of his dreams, so we packed up our baby, our house, and our lives and made the move to Smyrna, Georgia (very near my husband’s job in Midtown Atlanta).
We have been living in Smyrna, Georgia since the summer of 2023 and could not be happier. Smyrna has welcomed us with open arms - a feeling I hope to spread to everyone I meet. My husband and I are both lawyers here in Smyrna, we have two beautiful children and feel so blessed to be able to watch their lives unfold. We still love trivia nights and games, but we spend most of our non-working time at some kind of baseball field, cheering on our 8-year-old All Star.
Education
Education
In college, at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, I studied mathematics. I have always loved the joy and satisfaction of solving a puzzle. I later earned my Master of Public Administration with a focus on Homeland Security, and then attended law school in North Carolina. I have always loved school and learning new things. Luckily, as attorneys, we are required to attend a minimum number of hours to continue our legal education every year.
How Immigration Has Impacted My Life
My mother worked as a mission travel agent all through my childhood and for almost 40 years until she retired last year. Travel, cultural exploration, and humanity were instilled in me at a very young age. I did my undergraduate study abroad in Segovia, Spain in 2007 and spent the summer of 2014 doing a legal internship in Beijing, China. While Spain was breath-takingly gorgeous and China was an interesting culture shock, my home is definitely right here in the United States.
When I met my Korean-born husband, he was here in the United States on an F-1 student visa, and has since become a U.S. Citizen (marriage-based adjustment of status and then naturalization). This was my first introduction to the very complicated US immigration system.
I later worked as an immigration attorney for the nonprofit resettlement agency, Kentucky Refugee Ministries (KRM). It was my job to help arriving refugees become integrated into their new communities, and help them work through the (often confusing and tedious) paperwork of the immigration process when it was time. I also worked very closely with many of the Afghan immigrants as they applied for and were approved for asylum after arriving in the US. This was an amazing experience for me as I was able to combine my experience as a curious world traveler with my educational background in homeland security and law to actually help people.
When we moved to the Atlanta area for my husband’s job, I was devastated to leave KRM, but excited for our new opportunity. As I was on the job search for something in the Atlanta area, I knew I wanted to continue my focus on immigration law, as I had finally found the niche I was made for. For about the first two years of our Smyrna lives, I worked at a private firm focussing solely on immigration matters before the EOIR Court System and USCIS, including asylum, family-based, and humanitarian immigration. These two years gave me further insight into not only the national policies and processes, but also I gained great experience before the Atlanta Immigration Judges, in particular, and our local system. I thoroughly enjoy getting to know my clients and their families, hearing their stories, and helping them to figure out what their goals are and where their specific details put them within the US Immigration system.
When I heard about the possibility of joining Hope Immigration, I was thrilled and jumped at the chance! Tracie and her staff here at Hope make up an ideal immigration team. Every staff member here at Hope is intelligent, compassionate, and creative in their experienced approach to the US Immigration systems. I am so grateful to be a part of a team that I know I can count on, both inside and outside of the court room, and who will fight for our clients as we navigate this scary and unthinkable political climate. Knowing we can face and tackle these challenges together is the only silver lining of these unpredictable times.
Early Career
In high school, I spent a lot of time babysitting and I worked at the local movie theater. It was amazing for a girl who loves to watch movies! With this job came three free movie tickets per day! It definitely earned me points among my friends since the movie theater was a “cool” place to hang out! ...and did you know that for 25¢ more, you can get a large and get free refills?!
During college summers and breaks, I worked as an environmental technician for a pharmaceutical research and development company. This was an awesome gig - I helped gather and crunch some of the emission numbers to make sure this big company was within the legal limits of volatile organic compound emissions since much of the chemical waste was discarded via a huge, garage-size incinerator.
After undergrad, I was not quite sure what to do with a degree in mathematics, and was also limited in options due to the “recession” of 2008. So, I earned a job as a recruiter for university engineers (often needing sponsorship for an H1-B Visa), but that was short lived when a hiring freeze was put into effect. Thanks 2008. But then I spent the rest of that year working at a Montessori school and loved it!
By the Fall of 2009, I knew I wanted to go back to school (nerd alert). So I enrolled in a graduate program where I would get to focus my studies on homeland security. My Graduate Thesis examined the cost that our society pays in the form of humanity for a false sense of security, specifically enhanced interrogation techniques.
While I was in graduate school, I worked part time in my uncle’s law firm and part time as a research assistant for one of my professors. We often researched, analyzed, and presented interesting ideals and statistics about local political occurrences including rampant voter fraud in Kentucky and other instances where the wealthier members of society are powerful merely because they are rich.
Legal Career
Legal Career
I started my legal career with the first private firm that would give me a job offer, and ended up doing personal injury work on the insurance defense side. I worked on car accidents, slip-and-falls, medical malpractice, workers compensation, and negligence cases. Although I knew this area of law was not particularly right for me, my time spent here did give me good experience with client communication, court filings, document preparation, evidence collection, mediation, and demands. I also enjoyed getting to occasionally represent the hard-working small business owners and defend them against strong-armed attorneys.
After about 5 years of insurance defense practice, I knew that I wanted to make a change, I just did not know to what?! So I took some time off to try to figure out what I was made for. And then I did: Immigration Law.
I came across an amazing nonprofit resettlement agency in Lexington called Kentucky Refugee Ministries (KRM). They were doing amazing work with refugee families that had been displaced from their homes and were being relocated to the US, specifically in Kentucky. It was my job to help arriving refugees become integrated into their new communities, and help them work through the (often confusing and tedious) paperwork of the immigration process when it was time. I also worked very closely with many of the Afghan immigrants as they applied for and were approved for asylum after arriving in the US. This was an amazing experience for me as I was able to combine my experience as a curious world traveler with my educational background in homeland security and law to actually help people.
When we moved to the Atlanta area for my husband’s job, I was devastated to leave KRM, but excited for our new opportunity. As I was on the job search for something in the Atlanta area, I knew I wanted to continue my focus on immigration law, as I had finally found the niche I was made for. For about the first two years of our Smyrna lives, I worked at a private firm focussing solely on immigration matters before the EOIR Court System and USCIS, including asylum, family-based, and humanitarian immigration. These two years gave me further insight into not only the national policies and processes, but also I gained great experience before the Atlanta Immigration Judges, in particular, and our local system. I thoroughly enjoy getting to know my clients and their families, hearing their stories, and helping them to figure out what their goals are and where their specific details put them within the US Immigration system.
When I heard about the possibility of joining Hope Immigration, I was thrilled and jumped at the chance! Tracie and her staff here at Hope make up an ideal immigration team. Every staff member here at Hope is intelligent, compassionate, and creative in their experienced approach to the US Immigration systems. I am so grateful to be a part of a team that I know I can count on, both inside and outside of the court room, and who will fight for our clients as we navigate this scary and unthinkable political climate. Knowing we can face and tackle these challenges together is the only silver lining of these unpredictable times.
