Director of ICE Says Deportations Should Operate More Like Amazon Prime

When Donald Trump first ran for president in 2016, he promised his voters that he would run the government like a business: draining the swamp of corrupt bureaucrats, leveraging tax loopholes to keep money flowing, and keeping operations "under budget and ahead of schedule."

That's a bad enough idea for the federal government as a whole — as we saw when the US lost 3 million jobs over Trump's first term — but an especially horrifying thought when applied to a law enforcement agency. Yet that's exactly what Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting director Todd Lyons envisions for the future of deportations in the United States.

Speaking at the Border Security Expo earlier this week, Lyons bellowed that "we need to get better at treating this like a business," specifically, "like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

His goal for the agency, Lyons said, is to see caravans of trucks hauling off immigrants at an industrial scale, reminiscent of the e-commerce giant's roving crews of "delivery service partners," who don't actually work for Amazon.

Lyons' rhetoric matched that of numerous speakers who told the crowd of military-industrial complex delegates that the Trump administration "is depending on the private sector to implement its mass deportation agenda," the Arizona Mirror reported. "We need to buy more beds, we need more airplane flights and I know a lot of you are here for that reason," said Tom Homan, Trump's "border czar."

In addition to streamlining the task of rounding people up, Lyons noted his dream of incorporating AI into the immigration system in order to "free up bedspace" and "fill up airplanes" — basically insinuating, along with Homan, that the goal is to simply ship human beings out of the US as fast as possible, due process be damned.

If there's a more mechanized horror show than the one we already have, it's pretty hard to imagine. Like each of his predecessors, Trump's ICE is furthering the industrialization of immigration enforcement in the US by partnering with Silicon Valley to deploy AI surveillance tech, invoking the Alien Enemies Act to expedite deportations, and outsourcing detention to brutal sites like Guantanamo or the El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center.

The sheer scale harkens back to the German government under Adolf Hitler, which gradually learned to industrialize the Holocaust by partnering with private companies like IBM, which provided punch cards and routed trains for the Third Reich.

For ICE, Amazon isn't just a model to aspire toward, but a valued partner. Eerily, a 2020 report by Mijente found that Amazon was the key player in the "Cloud Industrial Complex," providing ICE and other law enforcement agencies with biometric data storage and case management systems, enabling mass surveillance, detentions and deportations. A recent investigation uncovered that Amazon was providing cloud computing capacity to US Customs and Border Control, confirming its continued role in the automation of the US migration system.

If Lyons gets his way, it'll mean huge payouts for companies that get their hands dirty — and even more suffering for those seeking asylum on US soil.

More on immigration: A Peek Into Trump's AI Border Dystopia