It’s never a good thing when a government official starts dreaming about operating like a business. It’s particularly heinous when that official is the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told attendees at the 2025 Border Security Expo in Phoenix that he hoped to model his agency after online shopping giant Amazon, saying he was envious of their shipping and logistics. Lyons envisioned a future in which the mass roundups and deportations of people in the United States could run as efficiently as ordering a cheap pair of headphones.
“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Lyons said, per the Arizona Mirror.
The man charged with carrying out President Donald Trump’s promised mass deportations hoped his agency could operate “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
Trump border czar Tom Homan also had the private sector on the brain, urging attendees to think about contracting out his administration’s deportation scheme wherever possible.
“We need to buy more beds, we need more airplane flights and I know a lot of you are here for that reason,” Homan said. “Let the badge and guns do the badge and gun stuff, everything else, let’s contract out.”
In the early months of his second term, Trump has ramped up immigration enforcement actions. His administration has loosed ICE on immigrant communities and sent the agency to detain lawful residents of the United States who speak ill of Israel.
Most recently, the admin authorized deportations without due process to an ostensible prison and actual black site in El Salvador.
Trump’s agents rounded up Venezuelans in the country under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, declaring them to be part of an invasion of the United States by the gang Tren de Aragua, and shipping them off to El Salvador without trial. Many of the people snatched and disappeared by the Trump admin claim to have no affiliation with the gang in question.
There’s one area where ICE and Trump have no interest in acting like Amazon: the retail giant offers easy returns. Trump’s administration has repeatedly defied court orders to halt deportations and return wrongfully deported people. In this, Trump’s lackeys have a friend in the Supreme Court. The highest court overturned a restraining order on the admin’s ongoing deportations and blocked an order to bring legal resident Abrego Garcia back to the United States.
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