One-click deportations

By Lydia Polgreen

A few weeks ago, I tried to return an item I had mistakenly ordered from Amazon. The website said I needed to contact customer service, but when I clicked the link, it took me to an artificial intelligence bot that provided no answers, just a link back to the place I started. This was a faceless and hopeless process with no clear venue of appeal. Despite Amazon’s supposedly friendly logo — an arrow shaped like a smile — the process seemed designed to get me to give up, which I promptly did.

This low stakes bit of Kafkaesque bureaucracy is maddening even for something as inconsequential as a mistaken order. So I was astonished when I read this declaration made by a senior Trump administration official last month at a border security trade show in Arizona:

“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” the acting ICE director, Todd Lyons, said of deporting people from the United States without due process, musing that it should work like Amazon’s Prime, “but with human beings.”

This was a shocking, dehumanizing thing to say, but I wasn’t surprised that it made little impression beyond a ripple of social media posts. It stuck with me, however, because it is emblematic of two terrifying trends that have unfolded since Donald Trump took office.

One is the administration’s chilling reliance on surveillance technology and artificial intelligence, from the apparent scanning of social media posts to deny student visas to the use of AI to purge government programs suspected of engaging in woke activities. (The latter has had absurd results, like removing references on Pentagon websites to the Enola Gay.)

The other is the stubborn support for Trump on immigration that showed up in poll after poll, even as his approval on just about everything else, especially the economy, collapses. The latest surveys have found that support slipping slightly, but immigration remains his strongest major issue among voters, even as his administration has sent gangs of masked agents into the streets to whisk people onto deportation planes, detained even children in his drive to expel migrants and lawlessly sent people with no criminal background to a gulag in El Salvador.

Now Trump muses about ejecting American citizens, too, and has attempted to exclude his actions from judicial review by invoking national security. He is determined to assert unilateral authority to strip people of the most basic constitutional protections and enact the fantasy of expelling every person he deems undesirable.

So this is where we are, 100 days in. Popular indifference — enthusiasm is not required — combined with the use of frictionless technology to execute a vision of expulsion. In this new world, any one of us can be categorized by faceless technology, then shipped outside the constitutional sphere, beyond the bounds of any appeal, with ruthless efficiency.

It is Amazon Prime not just for people but for a nation: turning American constitutional democracy into fascism with the click of a button, an arrow and a smirking smile.