President Donald Trump’s goal to mass deport millions of illegal aliens from the United States will require better technology at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), akin to technology used in the private sector at Amazon or FedEx, ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons says.
During the Border Security Expo earlier this month, LMI Principal of Business Development Phil Hassel asked Lyons about where he is “seeing the stresses on the system in terms of the overall logistics throughout?” according to a complete transcript reviewed by Breitbart News.
Lyons said ICE is facing challenges with its deportation ICE Air Operations, which he called “amazing” because the agency is “really good at removing folks,” though bottlenecks do exist.
“What it’s going to take to meet the president’s goal is a lot of technology, almost like an Amazon or a FedEx model,” Lyons said. “You know, how they move packages from point A to point B — it’s something we need to get better at.”
“With the help of CBP now, with the National Incident Coordination Cell — the work they do up there, between scheduling flights, you know, land border removals, working with the State Department to get those people travel documents … it’s a great effort,” Lyons continued:
The issue is just — we need to get better at treating this like a business, right? Where it’s — this mass deportation operation is something like you would see in, say, like Amazon trying to get your Prime delivered within 24 hours, right? [Emphasis added]
So trying to figure out how to do that with human beings, right? In trying to get them pretty much all over the globe, is really something for us that we’re — I’d say we’re struggling with it, we’re still doing a great job — but that’s what’s kind of leading to our numbers in this kind-of bottleneck and the fact that, we have a lot of individuals, as Mr. Homan said, that were asylum seekers in the past, and the court backlog is just jamming up to the fact that we know where these people are. [Emphasis added]
Lyons said ICE is looking to use Artificial Intelligence technology “or some new type of data-driven initiative, to quicken the nation’s immigration court backlog” where more than 3.6 million cases remain pending.
At the same time, Lyons said ICE hopes to carry out larger and larger deportation operations to free up much-needed detention bed space.
“We’re just not turning our beds over enough,” Lyons said.
In Trump’s first 100 days in office, ICE agents deported more than 66,000 illegal aliens from the U.S. — including nearly 2,300 gang members — and arrested more than 65,000 across American communities.
Most recently, in a first-of-its-kind operation in Florida, ICE agents arrested almost 800 illegal aliens with the help of local law enforcement agencies.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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