PHOENIX — There’s a ton of money to be made with the Trump administration’s commitment to mass deportation and a militarized approach to drug cartels.

An annual border expo this week showed what the future of immigration enforcement could look like. There were constantly spinning radar mounts that can spot the speck of a human being crossing the barren Sonoran Desert, driverless offroad buggies to chase them down for miles and quickly deployable tents to detain them at massive encampments.

There were drones of all shapes and sizes. Unmanned United has small ones that tear through the skies at 100 mph, a larger silver model with a Gatling-style machine gun protruding from its nose, and blue-gray camouflaged behemoths that one sales representative giddily explained can drop a 300-pound “payload” — military jargon for bomb — on “the enemy.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s immigration and border enforcement arms have ramped up staffing by more than 12,000 this year. But the expo showed how developing technology can escalate enforcement even more — few human beings required — to follow through on President Donald Trump’s promise to end unauthorized border crossings and deport immigrants.

The most eye-catching display was Overland AI’s SUV-sized, 3,500-pound fully autonomous tactical vehicle, the Ultra, which is meant to venture into rugged terrain that could be tainted with biological or chemical weapons fallout. At the border security conference, flyers featured photos of it patrolling the desert and listed “reconnaissance and strike” as the top use case.

For the past two decades, the business conference has showcased what has been described as the “border security complex,” akin to the military-industrial complex President Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address in 1961.

During a panel Tuesday on combatting cartels, one attendee asked Trump administration officials, “How can the industry help?” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche fielded a similar question Wednesday from an attendee who asked how private corporations can provide technology to smooth interagency coordination.

Artificial intelligence was front and center at this year’s expo. Most exhibitors made some mention about how AI was being used to speed up sorting through data. IBM had a particularly large booth.

Still, much of the show floor was dedicated to combat.

Some of it was defensive. Dana Safety Supply displayed a bullet-riddled ballistic glass panel that covered up the driver side of a white Dodge Ram truck — meant to protect Border Patrol agents from gunshots.

Other companies focused on training technology. VirTra featured an immersive room of towering 4K screens simulating bloody and deafening gunfights. (This reporter spent a heart-pounding five minutes clearing rooms during a simulation of a school shooting.) A sales representative said Customs and Border Protection has purchased dozens of simulators to train its officers across the country.

Most technology was geared toward the border. Cochrane displayed two of its massive, free-floating barrels along with photos of them in the Rio Grande, where they held up a folding metal fence to block people from crossing. Senior sales representative Gabriel Pérez-Wilson explained how a folding metal fence that reaches the river floor allows the orange buoys to rise and fall with the tide and prevents migrants from swimming beneath. The same corrosion-resistant, zinc-coated fencing is used at the U.S. Capitol to block off construction, in the Philadelphi Corridor to stop Palestinians from fleeing Gaza for Egypt, and at a Saudi prince’s private safari hunting grounds.

But weaponry and gear was marketed for use far from the border, too, including in respect to civilians who have increasingly taken to the streets to protest deportation surges in U.S. cities. Several booths exhibited riot gear and ballistic helmets to be worn by “operators” deployed in the nation’s “interior.”

Other booths were of the silly variety. Law enforcement agents love their challenge coins, and Point Emblems displayed dozens of them. A sales representative said the weirdest recent request for a custom coin came from Mark Lamb, a former county sheriff who’s running as a Republican to fill the Arizona congressional seat that Rep. Andy Biggs will soon depart from. That collector’s item featured Lamb with the U.S. Constitution in one hand and an AR-15 in the other. Lamb confirmed that afterward in a phone call.

A few vendors marketed the ability to quickly deploy infrastructure at makeshift detention facilities. Satellite Industries, which makes what it calls “detention grade” stainless steel Sanitrax toilet/sink modules, marketed “vacuum technology.”

Some companies were quick to disavow any knowledge of how their products are employed and deployed. Joe Thomas, the global sales director at FORTS, mentioned to a passerby that three of his company’s mobile medical pods have been placed at the Florida swamp immigrant detention camp dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” which was temporarily shut down by a federal judge. Asked by this reporter about the contract arrangement, he quickly threw up his hands and said, “Sometimes you don’t know where your product is going.” He said his company was subcontracted by another contractor on the government project.

Thomas said he had spent months negotiating business deals to place these medical pods to provide humanitarian assistance in Ukraine, but the arrangements fell through when the Trump administration yanked away funding.

Others also brought up war. Employees from the German company Aartos explained how their radio frequency jamming technology has been used in an Eastern European nation they would not identify to incapacitate enemy drones. They said it was their first time at the border security conference, and they hoped to get the attention of federal agencies interested in zapping unmanned aerial vehicles that human smugglers and drug cartels use to scout the U.S.-Mexico border.

Frank Carroll, a conservative Arizona state senator, told NOTUS that he has some financial and logistical concerns about the technology boom. After touring the show floor, he said he mostly thinks about the funding that agencies would need to acquire all these new wares — and the hidden cost of maintenance and IT support.

He dismissed a question about whether he had moral concerns about products being used for mass detention. Deportation agents still have a job to do, he said, and if cities refuse to open up their jails to detain migrants, then corporate America will fill that gap.

“We create a monster of our own making,” he said.