The top ICE official wants his agency to mass-deport undocumented migrants the same way that Amazon delivers packages—a fleet of trucks moving their cargo across the country with ruthless efficiency.
“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, said at a border security conference in Arizona this week, according to The Arizona Mirror. He explained that he aspires to an immigrant removal process that is “like Prime, but with human beings,” referring to Amazon’s expedited delivery program.
Jeff Bezos, the firm’s multibillionaire owner, has been one of a number of America’s richest people who have been making an increasingly rightward turn since Donald Trump was elected. He donated a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration, and in February gave the opinion section of The Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, a MAGA makeover. He was rewarded with a $2.3 billion federal contract for his rocket company, Blue Origin, this week.
ICE did not immediately return a request seeking an explanation of the extent to which Lyons hopes to model the deportation operation off of Amazon.
Alongside Lyons, the 2025 Border Security Expo’s speaker list featured the other top Trump administration officials in charge of carrying the president’s deportation plan: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and “border czar” Tom Homan.
The expo afforded an opportunity for hundreds of technology and defense companies to show off their latest products related to border control as they sought to land government contracts. In his speech, Homan affirmed that Trump’s mass deportation effort would need to rely on the private sector.
“We need to buy more beds, we need more airplane flights and I know a lot of you are here for that reason,” he said, according to The Mirror, adding: “Let the badge and guns do the badge and gun stuff, everything else, let’s contract out.”
Homan struck a similar note earlier this week when he complained that Congress was not doling out enough funding to the removal operation.
“To do more, we got to buy more detention beds. We need more flights. We need more officers. We need more overtime,” he told Semafor Monday. “Bottom line is: The more money we get, the more successful we will be.”
At the expo, Homan also expressed his indignation at the pushback that the Trump administration has faced to its use of a wartime law from 1798, the Alien Enemies Act, as a basis to remove immigrants.
“That is a law enacted by Congress, and we are using that,” he said. The conservative-laden Supreme Court ruled shortly before Homan was due to speak that for the time being Trump could continue to deport under the law—although Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett sided against him, joining the court’s liberal wing.
For his part, Lyons said that the act was “amazing” for how much it sped up the deportation process.
When Noem’s time to speak came, she previewed her aspiration to raise the deportation operation to an even greater level of efficiency, vowing to put the endeavor “on steroids.” She said that the administration plans to deploy “new technology,” including biometrics, The Mirror reported.
For Noem, who was announced late as a keynote speaker, the trip to Phoenix served a double purpose. Alongside the conference, she found time to grab a rifle and pose for yet another social media photo-op, tagging along on an ICE raid.
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