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While Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kritsi Noem is busy cosplaying as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent — and pointing a rifle at an actual agent’s head while she does it — Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons is plotting how to turn the U.S. immigration enforcement system into an Amazon-style business for deportations.
According to a Wednesday report from AZ Mirror, during a speech at this year’s Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Lyons told the audience that “we need to get better at treating this like a business.”
“Like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings,” Lyons added. He expanded on his vision: “We need to buy more beds, we need more airplane flights and I know a lot of you are here for that reason.”
It should come as no surprise that President Donald Trump and his top immigration officials want to both increase and expedite the number of deportations. In the first months of his presidency, Trump has tested a variety of ways to skirt established immigration law and removal proceedings, including through the attempted use of the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), an 18th century law that allows the president to detain and remove non-citizens during times of war, “invasion or predatory incursion.”
For weeks now, the Trump administration has been locked in a fierce court battle over the removal of over 200 Venezuelan and Salvadoran immigrants to prisons accused of human rights abuses in El Salvador. The government has argued that not only are the deportations legal under the Alien Enemies Act, but that they have no power to return those removed without due process because they are now in the custody of a third party: El Salvador. The administration has openly admitted that at least one of the men disappeared into a foreign prison system — Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia — was sent there as a result of an “administrative error,” and reporting by multiple outlets have found that the vast majority of those sent to El Salvador lacked any criminal record.
Earlier this week, the Supreme Court blocked the enforcement of a lower court order commanding the Trump administration to return Abrego Garcia to U.S. soil, but required the government to grant future deportees under the AEA proper notice and the ability to challenge their removal in federal court.
On Wednesday, a Trump-appointed judge in Texas blocked the administration from using the AEA to remove several Venezuelan migrants currently in detention. “The Supreme Court has established that individuals detained under the Alien Enemies Act ‘must receive notice … that they are subject to removal under the Act[,]” and the “notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs,’” District Court Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. wrote in his decision. Thus, “In the present matter, the Court finds that the removal of [the men,] or any other individual subject to the Proclamation, by the United States would cause immediate and irreparable injury to the removed individuals.”
It’s unclear how the courts will ultimately resolve the issue, but in the meantime the migrants being detained without recourse are trapped in a legal limbo that challenges the very foundations of due process rights.
Trump’s ICE director seems to think migrants don’t deserve any more due process than a package from Amazon.
