Long before he was the most recognized immigration attorney in North Texas, Arvin Saenz sat with files at the Department of Veterans Affairs and learned to do something almost no one is trained for: put a number on human pain. "I read probably a hundred thousand medical records to make financial assessments," he recalls. "I had to somehow quantify suffering, which is very numbing after a while."

That early, unglamorous work turned out to be the hinge of an entire career. A disabled combat veteran with an accounting background and Marine Corps discipline, Saenz did not set out to become an immigration lawyer at all. He set out to become a medical malpractice attorney. What pulled him in another direction was a simple recognition that has guided him ever since. "Suffering is suffering," he says. The veterans he studied, the injured workers he later represented, and the immigrants he now defends all shared the same thing, and he found himself drawn, again and again, to the people with the least protection.

From the Department of Veterans Affairs to Immigration Law

Saenz's path into law was anything but linear, and he is the first to point that out. After his time at the VA, he earned his degree intending to litigate medical malpractice. The job market had other plans. He landed in personal injury and workers' compensation, where one detail made him unusually valuable. He speaks Spanish fluently, and by his estimate only five or six percent of Texas lawyers can say the same. The firm he worked for had a large base of monolingual Spanish-speaking clients, and suddenly Saenz was in demand.

It was around 2015, with immigration becoming a national flashpoint, that he saw what was coming. "I had notified my supervisors that maybe immigration is going to be a hot topic," he says. "A lot of clients are asking about that." He taught himself the fundamentals, moved to dedicated immigration firms to sharpen his craft, and began building the philosophy that would define his own practice.

Why Arvin Saenz Started His Own Immigration Firm

The turning point was uncomfortable. Saenz describes a client who qualified for a process that was shorter, cheaper, and far less risky than the multi-year, five-figure route the firm preferred to sell. When he raised it, leadership did not hear good lawyering. They heard lost revenue. "It's kind of like selling the SUV for seven years when you don't need the SUV, you need a smaller car," he says. The reprimand that followed became, in his words, "a little bit of a Batman story," the kind of embarrassment and pain that hardens into purpose.

He left and built his own firm on a standard so plain it is almost disarming. "It's very easy to move up in immigration law," he says. "All you got to do is not be horrible. That's the standard. Just do your job. Tell the clients what you're going to do, how you're going to do it, and follow your word." The opposite of that, in his telling, is treating clients like "indentured servants for years" to inflate a bill.

That ethic is reinforced by an unusual accountability structure. Saenz-Garcia Law is a family business. His mother, his brothers, and his own children work alongside him. "My own mother would report me to the state bar if she saw me doing something unbecoming," he says. "We have a very high sense of doing the right thing at my house."

Building the Number One Removal Defense Firm in Dallas-Fort Worth

A little over a decade after starting from nothing, Saenz-Garcia Law has become, by market share and by sheer case volume in immigration court, the leading removal defense firm in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. The firm now carries more than 24 attorneys and handles roughly 98 percent of immigration matters in house, from the "happy transactions" like family and talent-based visas to the harder humanitarian and asylum cases where Saenz first cut his teeth.

Increasingly, the work reaches beyond administrative courtrooms. The firm has moved into federal litigation, filing writs of habeas corpus in detention matters and suing in district court over what Saenz calls "arbitrary and capricious denials." He does not soften how he sees the stakes. "It's our biggest civil rights issue of our lifetime, what immigrants are going through," he says. "We are experiencing a redefinition of what human rights are."

Part of the firm's reach came from a decision Saenz made under pressure. When the pandemic hit and paid advertising stopped working, he refused to lay anyone off or cut pay. Instead he taught himself organic marketing and went all in on TikTok, where he has since built an audience of more than half a million followers. The lesson he took from it was less about content than about people. "It's not even so much about the good content," he says. "Being connected with the cool kids online is also very important." He befriended respected voices in the immigration community by leading with goodwill rather than a sales pitch. "I injected a lot of goodwill out into the universe," he says, and the credibility followed.

"Adapt or Die": Arvin Saenz on AI in Immigration Law

If there is one subject Saenz wants other professionals to stop avoiding, it is artificial intelligence. He frames it in the bluntest possible terms. "You either get with the program or you're left behind," he says, comparing the moment to the arrival of the fax machine, the internet, and the personal computer, each met by skeptics who called it a fad. "Adapt or you die. One of those two things."

He has little patience for the fear that AI will erase legal jobs, and reframes it with an image drawn straight from his own background. "Look at the AI as a suit of armor. It's like your Iron Man suit. It's just going to amplify what you already have, but by a lot." The threat, as he sees it, is not the technology. "You're not going to be replaced by AI," he says. "You're going to be replaced by somebody that knows how to use AI."

To make the point concrete, he reaches for two stories. One is Moneyball, where a data-driven approach quietly rewired an entire sport. The other is personal. One of his advisors, John Hewitt, founded Jackson Hewitt and Liberty Tax back when returns were still done by hand. Once Hewitt introduced computer-automated form filling, a single employee could produce eight to ten times the work, faster and more accurately. "AI is doing the same thing," Saenz says. "You just have to do it responsibly."

Advice for Immigrants and Aspiring Attorneys

For lawyers thinking about going out on their own, Saenz's counsel runs against the careful instincts of his profession. "Don't be too analytical," he says. "Analysis paralysis is a real thing." He prefers what he calls a "shoot, ready, aim" approach to the more common "ready, aim, shoot." Plans, in his experience, never survive contact with reality. "Plans never work out. It's not linear. I had a plan to be a medical malpractice lawyer, and I'm here in immigration." His remedy is to dive in and surround yourself with people sharper than you are, drawing a sharp line between advisors who are good lawyers and advisors who are good at business, because, as he notes, those are two different brains entirely.

For clients living through the fear of the current moment, his advice is gentler but just as firm. Communicate with your attorney, stop comparing your case to anyone else's, and step away from the noise. "Do not take advice from memes or videos, including my own," he says. "Put down the phone, stop talking about your immigration status. Just live your life, raise your kids. This is temporary." The algorithm, he warns, rewards what is sensational and gossipy. "Your thoughts are important things," he says. "Fill your head with good, positive thoughts."

Looking Ahead: 2026 and Beyond for Saenz-Garcia Law

Saenz is candid that growth right now is a balancing act. A single Supreme Court decision, he points out, could wipe out a large share of the firm's revenue overnight, so he is "cautiously scaling," diversifying into business immigration and federal litigation while keeping his humanitarian roots. His near-term ambition is geographic. He has his eye on Houston, but he wants the firm to first develop what he calls "a better reactionary force to all these changes" before planting a flag in a new city. Even amid the heavy work, there is room for the joyful kind. The firm recently brokered the arrival of a professional Honduran soccer team to the United States, a deal he describes simply as "very exciting."

Asked what he most wants readers to take with them, Saenz returns to the two ideas that have carried him from a VA file room to the front of his field. Be deliberate about who you trust. "Surround yourself with qualified people with good intentions, get various opinions, and go with the person that is passionate about what they do." And do not wait for permission to evolve. "Incorporate artificial intelligence into your life," he says, "one baby step at a time."

It is fitting advice from a Marine turned accountant turned immigration lawyer who never followed the plan he started with, and who built something bigger precisely because he was willing to keep adapting. As he puts it, with the matter-of-fact confidence of someone who has been underestimated before and proven the doubters wrong: "Just jump in, surround yourself with smarter people, and you'll figure it out."