15 Apr 2025

Soon

by Ben Ehrenreich

At some point in the next few days or even hours, my partner will give birth to a child. Her delivery date came and went earlier in the week, but with so much going on and the markets all yippy, who has time for the miracle of life? I’m sitting at the kitchen table, knowing that no matter how fast I type I might never finish this piece. She’s a few yards away in the bedroom, propped up on a giant, teal-colored, bratwurst-shaped pregnancy pillow, sipping tea and reading China Miéville. Out the window the treetops, bare just days ago, are bright with fresh green leaves.

Time is a whirlwind but I think it was yesterday that I read that the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—Todd Lyons, a man who looks like he swallowed a tombstone whole and got it stuck somewhere between his lower lip and the neat, red, oxford knot of his tie—announced that he wants the agency to “get better at treating this like a business.” By “this” he meant the important work of tearing people away from their families and shipping them shackled to other countries, not necessarily the ones that they grew up in or have ever seen. But the line that made the headlines was Lyons’s suggestion that ICE should function “like Prime, but with human beings.” He was referring to Amazon’s massive logistics network and extraordinary capacity to speed whatever sweatshop-produced garbage your fingers decide in the middle of the night that you urgently need to your home before your digestive tract has a chance to expel its current contents. Except not garbage, but actual people. And not home, but a Salvadoran super-prison out of everyone’s worst sci-fi nightmares.

Given the context though, it was clear that Lyons was talking about something more than just performing his agency’s patriotic duties with greater efficiency. He was, after all, not speaking at a policy forum, but at a trade show: the annual Border Security Expo, held this year at the Phoenix Convention Center. His audience was almost entirely composed of cops, Pentagon and Border Patrol officials, and the military and technology companies hoping to win lucrative contracts from government agencies like theirs: data crunchers, mercenary outfits, private prison and surveillance corporations, manufacturers of guns and robots and drones and robots that use guns to shoot down drones. The Expo was only opened to press at the last minute, after it was announced that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem would be speaking too. She likes the cameras, it seems.