Zygmunt Bauman (right) Photo by Miguel Riopa/Getty Images

By Olivia Haynie April 11, 2025

Like Amazon Prime — “but with human beings.” That’s how Todd Lyons, the Director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement director, described his vision for the agency’s deportation strategy.

Speaking on April 8 at the 2025 Border Security Expo at the Phoenix Convention Center, Lyons advocated for a nationwide system of trucks that would collect immigrants for deportation in a similar manner to Amazon delivery trucks. He emphasized order and timeliness, advocating for the use of artificial intelligence to speed up the process.

Lyons’ assertion that the deportation agency needs “to get better at treating this like a business” is reminding some sociologists of Max Weber’s theory of rationalization, which has been used to explain the development of the Holocaust.

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For Weber, one of the founding fathers of sociology, rationalization is the idea that consumer-based societies focused on modernization turn away from traditional moral values and processes and towards bureaucratic efficiency as an objectively better way of approaching government function. However, this can lead to catastrophic consequences.

In his 1989 book, Modernity and the Holocaust, Jewish theorist Zygmunt Bauman explained how the Holocaust reveals the ways in which rationalization allowed for grave human rights abuses to take place. Sociology professor Jack Palmer, director of the Bauman Institute at the University of Leeds, said that Bauman saw Nazi Germany, which had an obsession with modernity and racial purity, as a “gardening state.”

“The great state builders of 20th century modernity saw society as a kind of garden that needed to be tamed, made more orderly, made more beautiful, made more harmonious,” Palmer said. “And this garden in this view was sort of beset by weeds and pollutants, various sorts of groups who threatened the health and flourishing of that space.”

In Nazi Germany, Jews, with their seemingly strange nature and alleged economic control, were the pollutants that needed to be efficiently removed. This removal process, Bauman asserted, resulted in the dehumanization of both the targeted groups and the workers recruited for the job.

The division of a large social project into tiny procedural acts is what Bauman called “mediation of action.”

“You have a modern bureaucracy, which essentially allows for an order, a directive, to be quite dramatically distanced from its consequences,” Palmer explained.

For those who participated in the Holocaust as secretaries, transporters, and other laborers, this siloing of tasks allowed them to see their jobs removed from the bigger picture. They may have made the lists of those who would be sent to concentration camps, they may have helped direct trains full of Jewish prisoners to their deaths, they may have helped build the electric fences that would kennel Jewish prisoners and shock those trying to escape. But all they were asked to perform was one menial task — write what they were told on a sheet of paper, drive a train, build a fence.

What Lyons is suggesting for ICE seems to come from a similar rationalization logic and could result in a similar dehumanization of immigrants. A truck driver tasked with trafficking immigrant detainees across the country at high rates will be focused on doing their job: driving a truck. The fact that the people on their truck may have been detained despite having the proper authorization to stay in the U.S. or that the facility they will be taken to has a history of alleged human rights abuses, is a concern outside of the narrow realm of their specific responsibility in the assembly line of an Amazon Prime style deportation process.

“One of the consequences of this is that the disposable individual, the person who has been earmarked for the purpose of the action, appears on a sheet of paper as a kind of administrative problem rather than a human being,” Palmer said.

The use of artificial intelligence, as Lyons suggested, would further remove chances for human connection between ICE officials and immigrants. Considerations for human safety and wellbeing that might occur in the mind of a human employee could be overlooked.

“There’s a line in Modernity in the Holocaust, which I always remember, which is a very striking one, which is simply that the unimaginable ought to be imagined,” Palmer told me. “And I think, one of the things that’s happened since Bauman died in 2017 is that a series of things which we, I think, had perhaps presumed would be unimaginable, and things that echoed some of the darkest moments of 20th century history seem to have recurred in some sense.”

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