Todd Lyons, the director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said, “We need to get better at treating [deportations] like a business, like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” Lyons made these comments as a keynote speaker on April 8 at the 2025 Border Security Expo at the Phoenix convention center. Another featured speaker was Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, who is a leading voice to privatize border security and the deportation process. Homan said, “Let the badge[s] and guns do the badge-and-gun stuff. Everything else, let’s contract out.”
Border security and immigration enforcement are becoming more militarized, and indeed, the floor of the Border Security Expo looked like the showroom of the military-industrial-complex, according to the Arizona Mirror. The expo floor was full of military contractors, military-grade equipment, and even brochures written in military jargon. Much of this hardware can be currently found on the battlefields of places such as Ukraine. Companies included Thales, which has biometric data on 200 million people who have entered the U.S.; BAE Systems, with its sordid history of bribes, scandals, and intelligence operations for Britain; Caci International (which had to pay $42 million in fines for abuse and torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in 2004); the private prison company GEO Group, which is currently in court for breaking minimum wage laws in Washington State; Triple Canopy, which was formed by rival security companies, Blackwater and Constellis (according to Arizona Mirror, guards from this security company provide the muscle when Elon Musk tries to enter federal offices uninvited.)
