The most ghoulish things we saw at the Phoenix Border Security Expo

Like a litter of kitties around a milk bowl, government and business leaders assembled in Phoenix on Tuesday and Wednesday. They were there for the immigration industrial complex’s annual Border Security Expo, where they patted themselves on the back for closing the southern border and helping President Donald Trump implement mass deportations across the country — all at a staggering price to the American taxpayer.

Civil unrest and civilian dead. Citizens beaten, pepper-sprayed and unlawfully detained. The Constitution treated like toilet paper. Immigration detainees imprisoned in Third World-style conditions. These are the proud accomplishments of the Trump administration’s war on immigrants. And, as with every war, there are those who make bank and those who help them make bank.

Trump’s immigration crackdown, the signature piece of the president’s domestic agenda, is now unpopular with a majority of the public, according to one poll. Still, you wouldn’t know it from the more than 2,000 attendees who packed the Phoenix Convention Center to enthusiastically applaud speakers such as “Border Czar” Tom Homan and acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche.

The event featured an exhibition floor with 193 vendors hawking everything from drones and military vehicles to AI services and combat boots. Many of the exhibitors already have dipped their beaks into the $170 billion allocated to immigration enforcement and border security in 2025 by the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Some were just wannabe beak-dippers, looking to make a buck. 

Here are some of the most ghoulish things Phoenix New Times heard and saw at the carnival of human-herding cruelty that was the Border Security Expo — things not always ghoulish in and of themselves, but in how they might be used against others.

Show me the money

The two-day event kicked off with a rousing, profanity-laced tirade from Tom “Bagman” Homan, who is alleged to have taken a $50,000 bribe from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen seeking lucrative government contracts. Once Trump came into office, the DOJ — unsurprisingly — shut down the investigation. You might say Homan is the perfect mascot for an assembly of merchants and government apparatchicks looking to divvy up the immigration enforcement pie.

Homan’s address was full of threats, braggadocio and bullcrap. “You ain’t seen shit yet,” he crowed at one point. “This will be a good year. Mass deportations are coming, but as the president said from day one, criminals, public safety threats and national security threats have to be priority.” But that doesn’t mean everyone else is “off the table,” he added, claiming that “about 65 percent of everyone arrested right now are criminal, 35 percent are non-criminal.”

Almost the exact opposite is true, according to the numbers-crunchers at Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. The site reports that as of April 2026, more than 70% of those in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have no criminal convictions, and of the remaining 30%, many “committed only minor offenses, including traffic violations.”

Arresting citizens? Why not?

Homan was followed by a panel discussion that included acting ICE director Todd Lyons, who’s leaving the post at the end of May, and Customs and Border Protection commissioner Rodney Scott. At one point, Lyons admitted that the U.S. is “removing people to countries that I didn’t even know existed.” 

Indeed, immigration detainees are being shipped off to locales other than their countries of origin, like the African nations of Eswatini and Equatorial Guinea. Scott joked that some of those deported to obscure third-world nations are calling home, telling their friends, “I just wasted $10,000 on a smuggler.” Quite the rib-tickler, that Scott.

Scott and Lyons later took questions from the audience. When New Times asked about an October ProPublica report revealing that over 170 U.S. citizens have been arrested by federal authorities during immigration raids and protests — many of them brutally manhandled in the process — the pair owned the stat. “We arrest criminals, period,” said Scott, adding that “everyone on the stage has arrested U.S. citizens and we’ll keep doing that.” Lyons doubled down as well, exclaiming, “If you put your hands on a law enforcement officer in the middle of a law enforcement operation, you’re going to be arrested.”

Nice try, Todd, but in the examples cited by ProPublica, it’s ICE and Border Patrol agents who go hands-on with Americans who — more likely than not — just happen to not be as pasty white as the panelists and who have committed no crimes, much less an immigration offense. Federal gendarmes have been caught using chokeholds against minors, kneeing people in the back and indiscriminately using pepper spray and PepperBall guns against civilians exercising their First Amendment rights. And, as both Renée Good and Alex Pretti found out the hard way, just being in the vicinity of immigration cops can be a deadly proposition.

Blow ’em up, blow ’em up real good

Blanche gave a soporific address on day two of the event, forgiving his audience’s possible brain fogginess “on a morning when I’m sure at least some of you had a drink last night,” assuring them, “I’m not telling your wives or husbands, don’t worry.” After all, no one parties harder than a government vendor. 

Blanche recently took over from the hapless Pam Bondi, who fumbled the scattershot, incomplete release of the Epstein files. Before Trump took office for the second time, Blanche served as Trump’s personal attorney, unsuccessfully defending Trump against criminal charges in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case in New York while also representing Trump in federal cases involving alleged wrongdoing. He continues to earn his place at Trump’s table, most recently by indicting former FBI director James Comey for allegedly “threatening” the president with an Instagram post involving seashells arranged to read, “86 47.”

During his address, Blanche echoed Lyons’ bellicose pronouncements, claiming that the DOJ had brought 1,400 cases in the past year for assaults on federal officers. (He did not share how many resulted in convictions versus how many, like in the case of the Washington, D.C., man who flung a Subway sandwich at an immigration officer, were laughed out of court.) Blanche promised law enforcement officers that “we’re going to make sure that nobody can touch you without facing the full wrath of the federal government.” Not to belittle those actually assaulted in the line of duty, but “touch” is a rather low bar.

Regarding America’s never-ending drug wars, Blanche assured the crowd that he would make sure it remained never-ending. “For the first time in history, we’re treating them like terrorists and we’re blowing them up,” he said, in obvious reference to the country’s constitutionally suspect military strikes against alleged drug-running boats in the Caribbean. “And that’s legal and it’s right and it hopefully will create a disincentive for drug dealers to do what they’re doing.”

Or unlucky fishermen. 

Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican and sometimes critic of the president, has repeatedly pointed out that the strikes are illegal, immoral and do not comport with U.S. law, which does not prescribe the death penalty for transporting illicit drugs. “This is akin to what China does, to what Iran does with drug dealers,” Paul said in October. “They summarily execute people without presenting evidence to the public. So, it’s wrong.”

Shotguns, pepperballs and shoot-em-ups

Many of the merchant booths on the floor of the exhibit hall were, admittedly, perversely intriguing — perhaps none more so than that of the Chandler-based company VirTra, one of the sponsors of the event. VirTra creates “immersive training simulators” for law enforcement agencies such as Customs and Border Protection. The VirTra exhibit featured five projection screens for a nearly 360-degree immersion into a video scenario involving an angry driver armed with an axe handle.

A participant “officer” stands in the center of the room with a gas-powered pistol, with which one can “shoot” the advancing madman, attempt de-escalation or use less lethal options, such as tear gas. CBP utilizes 47 custom scenarios, according to the VirTra employee running the computer immersion program. During one session, another employee blew away the dude with the ax handle.

Another booth of note was a small one set up by the shotgun manufacturer Mossberg, which featured a specialty gun the firm is marketing to the military and Border Patrol. A mustachioed vendor pumped the 990 SkySweeper as “Mossberg’s solution to the emerging drone threats that we’re seeing all over the globe.” Supposedly, the gun has a range of up to 100 yards.

PepperBall’s display was, as one might expect, popular with the Border Patrol crowd. The vendors there went through the display of projectile guns, modeled on paintball guns, that shoot projectiles filled with Pelargonic Acid Vanillylamide (PAV) powder. The chemical irritant can incapacitate someone briefly, painfully affecting eyesight and the respiratory system.

The company also manufactures a handheld device that looks like a small flashlight and can fire one round of PAVA powder. One variant, marketed to law enforcement, comes with a pointed tungsten carbide tip that can be used to break a windshield glass, with the payload to be delivered through the opening. Civilians can buy one on Amazon, minus the tip, for $60.

From Ukraine with love

A number of all-terrain vehicles caught New Times’ eye, chief among these being the N1200, a box-like, amphibious vehicle straight from the battlefields of the Russia-Ukraine war. Manufactured by the Ukrainian company SHERP and sold in the Western hemisphere by SHERP USA, it’s relatively lightweight at 5,000 pounds, can carry up to nine persons and paddles through bodies of water on its ginormous, balloon-like tires. 

John Gavin, an executive with SHERP USA, told New Times that the N1200 is a logistics vehicle, used for “extremely long range, extremely remote access to places where there’s just not a road or a way to get out there.” It can also be used to barrel through ice-bound rivers and lakes, even if the ice breaks. So far, Gavin said they’ve only sold one to the Border Patrol, for use in North Dakota.

The floor was awash with companies marketing electronic surveillance towers and drones, but the sleekest was a bright orange Wingtra 11, a fixed-wing mapping drone on display in the Verizon booth. A Verizon employee on hand claimed the company uses the drone in cases of natural disasters and shares them with local authorities. Resembling a small stingray, the drone is actually made by a company headquartered in Switzerland.