The former immigration judge and Congressional staffer defended ICE but criticized the larger immigration system.
Judge Andrew ‘Art’ Arthur speaks to the Yale College Republicans. (Credit: Emily Akbar)
Emily Akbar
Campus Reporting Editor, The Buckley Beacon
On Wednesday, Yale College Republicans hosted former immigration Judge Andrew “Art” Arthur to discuss the United States’ evolving immigration policy. Arthur is the Resident Fellow in Law and Policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Arthur began his career at the Executive Office for Immigration Review, reporting to Attorney General Bill Barr under the first Bush administration. During the second Bush administration, Arthur worked in Congress and was oversight counsel for immigration on the House Judiciary Committee.
Some of the bills that Arthur helped pass in Capitol HIll included the Homeland Security Act, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, the REAL ID Act, and the Secure Fence Act. After leaving the Judiciary Committee in 2006, Arthur went to serve as an immigration judge in York County, Pennsylvania for eight years, where he heard thousands of deportation, removal, exclusion, and bond cases.
Arthur told the audience the story of his great-grandfather, Anton Reiser, who was born in Swabia, Germany. He described how Reiser immigrated to the United States in 1891 to Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, where he was a successful butcher and “well respected member of the community.” Despite his success, Arthur described how after the US went to war with Germany in 1917, Reiser received death threats for his German identity and ultimately killed himself—a part of the story that Arthur claimed does not get told often.
“When we talk about our nation being a nation of immigrants… we remember the good parts,” he said. “We remember, you know, the family struggle, but we never really talk about all of the dark parts of immigration history in the United States.”
Arthur then quantified the scope of immigration in the US. After asking the audience of students if anyone knows how many people the US accepts for permanent residence each year, he revealed that “around 1.2 million people” are admitted to the US and put on a path to citizenship each year, to which his remark received subsequent gasps from the crowd.
“It’s a lot, and it’s more than every other country in the world combined,” he noted.
He then asked the audience how many people the US naturalized each year, to which he revealed that “860,000 people, more or less, on average, become United States citizens every year. And even in that only about 54% of all green card holders ever become citizens.” Official Congressional accounts noted that over the last 20 years, around 758,000 individuals are naturalized annually.
“I think one of the biggest issues that Americans have is that they think very small when we talk about immigration. They think 100,000 people per year get green cards. They think that maybe we get a couple million visitors every year. And consequently, people look at what happened at the border under the Biden administration, and they don’t really see it.”
Concerning recent removals, Arthur defended the complicated nature of ICE and DHS agents who he characterized as following the Supreme Court’s orders. He explained that the Laken Riley Act requires DHS to detain individuals who are unlawfully present in the US or has been charged with, arrested for, or convicted of having committed certain crimes.
Under this law, Arthur claimed that Congress has “done something that they don’t do anywhere else in federal law; they have given states attorneys, state attorneys general, the authority to enforce the law on Congress’s behalf.”
“This is my 34th year of doing immigration. I saw things that happened in Minnesota. I saw things that happened in Chicago and Los Angeles and New York that didn’t make any sense to me. Again, they weren’t breaking the law. They were just doing the law in a way that didn’t make any sense to me,” he said.
“The Supreme Court has stated ICE has the duty to do those things. It’s not even optional that they have to do those things. So it’s a complicated issue,” he added.
When asked by a student in the audience whether there could be the possibility of strengthening systems that temporarily brought immigrants to work, Arthur described how the H-2A visa is a close equivalent. The H-2A visa is a temporary visa that lets agricultural workers stay and work in the US for up to three years.
Arthur expanded upon the “myth” of agriculture being strongly linked to immigration. “Two percent of the unauthorized population works in agriculture,” Arthur claimed. “And yet, whenever there’s any immigration crackdown, what’s the first thing they say? ‘Who’s going to pick the vegetables,’ which in my mind, is probably the most offensive thing that anybody can ever say.”
He added that out of the 466 different job categories that are recognized by the Department of Commerce, only four are primarily filled by immigrants, including agriculture, beauticians, sewing, and tailoring.
When asked by another student on how to reconcile backlog on immigration cases, Arthur lamented that the Trump administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill” capped the number of immigration judges to 800 when there is need for more than double that number, according to Arthur. He also explained that the Trump administration provided funding for 100,000 detention beds because these immigration cases can take years. As of February 2026, immigration courts reported receiving 201,878 new cases, with 3,318,099 active cases still pending and 2,322,671 immigrants awaiting asylum hearings.
Finally, when asked by a student about how immigrants can better assimilate, Arthur praised American culture for being “sticky,” as it has a “great ability to assimilate people.” However, he did raise concerns over how we can better assimilate immigrants to our values, beyond just acquainting them with language requirements and laws.
Arthur concluded his response with, “If you give me an answer to that, we will solve most of the problems that we have in immigration.”
Judge Arthur appeared last year in a debate on immigration issues with the Oxford Union Society in England.