Chris Richardson is a former U.S. diplomat and General Counsel and COO of BDV Solutions. He is a leading expert on immigration policy.
Richardson served in Nigeria, Nicaragua, Pakistan, and Spain as a U.S. diplomat. Throughout his time in the U.S. Diplomatic corps, Richardson managed hundreds of officers and local staff and conducted tens of thousands of immigrant and non-immigrant visa interviews. More critically, Richardson managed Embassy responses to crisis situations including terrorist attacks, plane crashes, violent national unrest, bombings, and hundreds of cases involving Americans who died abroad. For his service, Richardson won several awards including Meritorious Honors Awards and a Superior Honors Award.
Richardson resigned in protest due to President Trump’s Muslim ban and the President’s derogatory statements about African countries. Immediately upon resigning, he drafted an affidavit against the Muslim Ban which was cited by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in Trump v. Hawaii (2018).
Richardson has been featured in Mother Jones, Slate Magazine, Reuters, NPR, Embedded, All Things Considered, SCOTUS Blog, BBC, Georgia Public Radio, Intercept, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. He has also been interviewed by the MSNBC, New York Times, CNN and CBS. Richardson has written several well-received opinion columns for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Stars and Stripes, San Francisco Chronicle, Slate Magazine, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, The Hill, Foreign Policy Magazine, San Antonio Express-News, NewsOne, RealClearMarkets, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Charleston Post & Courier, Newsday, the Nation and many more publications regarding immigration policy and the issue of diversity at the State Department.
He has advised both Democratic and Republican members of Congress and their staffers in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate on critical immigration and foreign policy issues. Richardson served as the Chair of Pete Buttigieg’s immigration policy committee and worked on the Biden 2020 campaign. He is a highly sought-after speaker and has spoken about immigration and race at hundreds of universities, immigration law conferences, businesses, non-profit organizations, and US government institutions abroad.
A native of South Carolina, Richardson serves on the Board of Directors for Upstate Forever (an environmental group), The Nature Conservancy (South Carolina), and the Hispanic Alliance. He is a graduate of Duke University School of Law and graduated summa cum laude from Emory University in 2003. He is also the co-author of the Historical Dictionary of the Civil Rights Movement (2014) and lectured on the American Civil Rights Movement at universities and colleges across the globe.