The "Amazon Prime" of Deportation: The Logistics of ICE’s Warehouse Proposal
How ICE’s vision to treat deportation "like a business" led Director Todd Lyons to propose an 80,000-unit system that runs "like Prime, but with human beings."
There is a peculiar kind of sociopathy required to wake up, order an overnight package, and decide that the same model should be applied to human beings. Yet, this is exactly the "business" I.C.E Director Todd Lyons proposed during a “Border Security Expo” in Phoenix: a hub-and-spoke network of mega-warehouses where the "product" is a human being.
Todd Lyons stood at that podium back in April and talked about moving human beings from Point A to Point B in forty-eight hours like he was pitching a logistics contract. Internal documents — leaked, obviously, because nobody’s proud enough to put their name on this in the light of day — outline their plan for a “feeder system.”
Seven massive industrial warehouses, and 16 smaller ones. All located near airstrips for rapid deportation. They want these buildings to hold five to ten thousand people per building. The smaller warehouses would be used for staging meaning used for initial processing, identification, and "sorting" of detainees immediately after arrest. The "mega centers" would be export hubs.
They’re planning on using AI for "rapid sorting." They want to solve the "bottleneck."
You know how they’ve “solved the bottleneck” till now? Firing immigration judges and not even looking for new ones according to their FOIA response. You don't fire the entire judiciary because you want a more efficient legal process; you fire the judges because you want to bypass the legal process. Which they’ve tried. Repeatedly trying to use the National Guard as makeshift immigration judges.
As pointed out by Arturo Dominguez, they are pushing for “100 million” deportations. There are only fifty-one million immigrants in this country. Total. Foreign-born individuals, legal or otherwise. Fifty-one million. That’s naturalized citizens, green-card holders, and undocumented. There are 65 million Latinos total. There are an estimated 48 million black folks in America. You don’t get to a hundred million without de-naturalizing citizens.
That’s why they keep pushing for “remigration” a word adopted from the European far-right. It’s a polite, “intellectual” way of saying ethnic cleansing. And yes, this is an actual photo I pulled from the official White House Facebook page.
But here’s why this is scary NOW. This isn’t a ‘concept’ anymore; it’s $30 million dollar reality.
In late 2025, the Department of Homeland Security awarded a contract to KPB Services LLC (a subsidiary of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation’s economic arm). The listed reason for the contract is "due diligence services and concept design" meaning identifying potential warehouses, locations, and deciding how the factories would work.
The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation has since vowed to cancel this contract after members of the community outcry because — shockingly — nobody thought to ask the people living there if they were okay with it.
But that doesn’t mean it’s over. They will find another contractor. Once you have the blueprints for a cage, the cage is already halfway built. What happens when these designs move from Todd Lyons head to the earth? We all know that if they build these facilities, they won't tear them down when the immigrants are gone. They will simply find a new category of 'unperson' to fill the space.
They’re just sketching out the floor plan for the new American Gulag — for the homeless, the mentally ill, the addict, the dissenter — and calling it 'innovation.'
WAREHOUSES ARE FOR STORAGE, NOT PEOPLE
Warehouses are typically "shells" designed to keep goods dry, not to provide the high-frequency air exchanges required for health. In a standard warehouse, air circulation is minimal.
The insulation is non-existent. They are heat islands in August and ice boxes in January. And the plumbing? The sewer lines are designed for a warehouse staff of less than a hundred. To support 10,000+ people, they’d have to tear up the concrete slabs and the foundation of the entire building to lay miles of new pipe. Which they won’t do. They haven't done it for the tent camps like Alligator Alcatraz, ‘Deportation Depot’ and Lonestar Lockup; why would they do it here?
Head of DHS, Kristi Noem, has already admitted that the cruelty is the point. The inhumane conditions are supposed to “incentivize” people to give up their rights and agree to deportation.
If a fire were to break out, people will die. The sprinklers are sparsely hung, made to handle high-piled cardboard and plastic. Once they start putting walls up inside, they’re going to create areas that the sprinklers can’t reach. The fire code for warehouses assume a low occupant load. There aren't enough exits. There aren't wide enough corridors. If a fire starts in a "Mega-Center," people will die.
Warehouses often burn significantly faster and more intensely than other buildings like houses or offices. While a house fire might stay contained to a single room for several minutes, a warehouse fire can engulf thousands of square feet in a very short time.
If you haven’t yet, go ahead and search the internet for an image or a story of a warehouse fire. Now picture 10,000 people packed into one, and tell me how many people you believe are surviving that? Employees and detainees.
As it stands, most ICE detention centers are already horribly understaffed. The OIG found a facility in New Mexico running at fifty-four percent capacity for staffing. People were working mandatory 16-hour-shifts just to keep the doors open. They’re telling guards at the end of their shift, "You can’t leave because the relief didn't show up."
And even if they hired someone, federal security clearances to take the job? They take six to eighteen months. By the time the background check clears, the applicant is already working somewhere else for better pay. In Texas, these places are only offering employees nineteen dollars an hour.
And why should the companies care? They’re getting "availability fees." The government pays them a fixed monthly rate just to keep the lights on, even if the building is a ghost town. They generate revenue by not hiring. It’s a business model built on a skeleton crew. Much like nursing.
And when the guards get exhausted — when they’re working their sixth mandatory double-shift of the month — they stop talking. They use excessive force. They use solitary confinement because they don't have the numbers to manage a population through anything else. It’s not an excuse. It’s not acceptable. But it’s a fact.
Fifty percent of the facilities that already exist have no continuous physician coverage. Buffalo has seven hundred people and no doctor on-site until late 2026. Half of them have no psychiatric providers. Ninety-five percent of the deaths in custody between 2017 and 2024 were preventable.
If a doctor had been there to do a triage, those people would be alive.
They can’t staff the facilities they already own! And yet, Todd Lyons is at the podium promising "Point A to Point B" efficiency. They’re manufacturing a disaster, funding it with forty-five billion dollars awarded to them in the “Big Beautiful Bill”, and calling it efficient.
THE SCIENCE OF DEHUMANIZATION AND HOW IT LED US HERE
There are two ways to strip a person of their humanity. You can do what the President does and compare them to animals, to "vermin," to creatures. That’s "animalistic" dehumanization.
But what Todd Lyons is doing? That’s the machine. He’s turning people into cargo. Cargo doesn't have a life. Cargo doesn't have a crying child. Cargo doesn’t have hopes, dreams and fears. Cargo has a “shipping label” and a number. Not a name.
When you think of an immigrant as a "package," you stop thinking about fear or trauma. You strip away what Haslam calls "Human Nature" including their warmth, agency, emotional depth. You aren't "hurting a family" anymore; you’re "processing a unit."
It’s a form of psychological erasure, and heartbreakingly, it works.
In one Princeton study, Dr. Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske fMRIs on participants. When people looked at people they perceived as "high-warmth" — businessmen, athletes — the empathy center of the brain lit up. And when they saw the "low-warmth" people like the homeless or the addict? The brain didn't react. It didn't see a person. It saw an object.
Dehumanization quite literally leads people not viewing a human as a human.
When you spend years beating it into people’s heads that their lives are worse because of immigrants (even if it’s a lie) the brain stops asking, "Would they be cold in that warehouse? Are they getting enough to eat?" and starts asking, "How can we run this like a business?"
They’ve created a state where a significant portion of the country can watch a video of a child in an industrial warehouse and only see "inventory" that’s slightly behind schedule. And they’re applying that same rhetoric and animalistic dehumanization… calling people, “radical, leftist lunatics” if they dare step in their way. Creating the psychological acceptance in society needed for their next ‘unperson’ to put behind those walls. You. Me. Them. Us.
Excellent reporting once again. Your topic selection is ALWAYS something NO ONE else is talking about! I’m so grateful. The reality described here in this piece is absolutely gruesome and terrifying and something everyone must understand asap.
Thank you for shedding light always and HUMANIZING our beloved neighbors, family and friends.
This is horrifying. Illuminating. God awful. How do we stop it?
How do we humanize people who are seen as inhuman to MAGA ? They are literally so psychologically ruined that they can’t see what is right in front of their own eyes.