President Donald Trump’s head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said he wants to see the deportation process look like "[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings."
ICE's Acting Director Todd Lyons made the remarks during the 2025 Border Security Expo at the Phoenix Convention Center on April 8, 2025, according to the Arizona Mirror.
His vision would see squads of ICE agents in trucks rounding people up and shipping them to other countries in the same way that Amazon ships packages.
“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Lyons said, before making the comparison to Amazon Prime.
Lyons also said he wanted to see technology like artificial intelligence used to "free up bed space" and "fill up airplanes" to help ICE speed up its deportations.
He also said he'd been working with Tesla CEO and head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, to look for evidence of "voter fraud."
The ICE boss called the president's use of the Alien Enemies Act to justify his mass deportations "amazing."
Lyons wasn't the only one who wants to see deportations handled like a business. Trump's "border czar" Tom Homan also backed the idea of using private businesses to assist in deportations.
“Let the badge and guns do the badge-and-gun stuff. Everything else, let’s contract out,” he said.
One of the companies already working with the Trump administration's deportation agenda is Avelo Airlines, which recently announced it had signed an agreement to fly deported individuals out of Mesa, Arizona, beginning in May.
Several thousand people signed a petition asking the airline not to work with the Trump administration, according to The Guardian.
Other companies reportedly in attendance at the event included Anduril Industries, a defense contractor with ties to Republican megadonor Peter Thiel's Palantir. and Geo Group, an ICE-contracted private prison company. Geo Group's stock price has shot up in the aftermath of Trump's election.
Many immigrants who are in the US but who are not citizens have cooperated with immigration authorities by attending regular check ins with ICE. After Trump took office, he broadened ICE's enforcement mandate to arrest all immigrants without legal status in the U.S., even if they were cooperating with authorities and attending their check-ins.
In one instance, a Vietnamese father who has been in the U.S. since he was a child was taken into custody at a check-in, leaving his wife — the working parent in their relationship — to both work full-time and care for their young child on her own.
According to data from UC Berkeley Law School's Deportation Data Project, ICE's arrests have included people previously released on supervision and those with pending immigration proceedings.
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