The GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” last year allocated $45 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to build and run camps to lock up immigrants—potentially more than 100,000 people on any given day. From Alligator Alcatraz to the Speedway Slammer, ICE camps (or camps run by for-profit corporations on behalf of ICE) have become a defining image of the Trump era—the most obvious physical manifestation of the fascistic forces that have taken over our government, and the functional linchpin of Trump’s immigration strategy. As John Washington writes in his new book, How to Close a Camp: Dispatches From the Fight Against Immigrant Detention: “All of the pomp and terror in the streets during Trump’s second administration—the prowling agents in military gear, the mass arrests, the stalking of schools and courtrooms—depends on the government having somewhere to detain the people they arrest.”
It perhaps doesn’t need saying that Washington’s new book is timely. It’s interesting, then, that this timeliness is one of the themes that How to Close a Camp attempts to push back on. The author, a journalist, has spent years reporting on the horrors of immigration detention. So as much as the system has reached new heights of barbarity under Trump, Washington is deeply aware that the problem did not originate—and won’t end—with our current president. As with so many of today’s nightmares, Republican Ronald Reagan lit the spark for our modern camp system—one 1981 memo by his attorney general on the use of immigration detention as a means of deterrence warned that “the appearance of ‘concentration camps’ … may be publicly unacceptable.” But Democrat Bill Clinton poured gasoline on the fire. In 1994, there were fewer than 7,000 immigrants in detention on any given day. By 2001, that was up to 19,500 daily.
This detention build-out has remained a bipartisan project. It was Obama who appointed Tom Homan—who went on to serve as Trump’s notorious “border czar”—as ICE’s executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations in 2013; in 2015, he presented him with the Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service. That was the same year that ICE opened the 2,400-bed South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, which earned the nickname “baby jail”—the camp where Liam Conejo Ramos, the boy in the iconic blue bunny hat, was held after ICE kidnapped him in Minneapolis earlier this year. Washington spent a week in 2015 reporting on the children inside the Dilley camp, many of whom were not eating or sleeping, becoming depressed, and regressing. “Kids who don’t play, diapers on nine-year-olds,” he writes. “This is Clinton, Obama, and Biden’s immigration policy legacy: building out the camp infrastructure to humiliate, starve, abuse, and lay the groundwork for their virulently anti-immigrant successors.”
The goal of Washington’s book is to facilitate the closure of these camps, regardless of which party controls the White House. As its title implies, parts of How to Close a Camp constitute a literal how-to guide for activists, based on the author’s years covering grassroots campaigns to shut down ICE facilities, as well as numerous interviews with organizers who have been on the ground leading these fights in communities across the country.
The key, Washington stresses, is to understand that immigration detention camps “are not abstract federal machines.” Rather, they are entities with physical buildings and plots of land that require concrete services and contracts, zoning permits and tax breaks, licenses and utility hookups. “Every one of these nodes is a potential pressure point,” Washington advises. And he goes into detail on how activists should be thinking about each point of vulnerability.
The text here can get intensely practical. To give one example (of many), Washington ends a section on how a camp’s licensing schemes can be an entry point for direct action with the following checklist for organizers:
● Identify all licenses held (state childcare, health, fire, safety, business, food services)● Research expiration dates and conditions for renewal● Track violations and whether provisional status is in effect● Publicize discrepancies between licensing requirements and actual conditions
Another section, which describes how permits and utilities can be pressure points, recommends these initial action steps:
● Review local zoning maps and determine the property’s designated use● Monitor variance requests (These are public record.)● File public records requests for safety inspection results and permit applications● Challenge permits based on environmental, fire safety, or occupancy violations
For my part, I found the how-to portions of How to Close a Camp quite useful. Or, rather, I found myself wishing that I had had this book back in 2019, when I was helping to organize a campaign to shut down an ICE detention facility in my home state of Rhode Island. Throughout that fight, we rallied and held vigils, blocked entrances and took arrest, even got run over by a guard. But we didn’t pursue a systematic course of action like the one laid out in How to Close a Camp, and the facility we were targeting remains open today.
Local community groups and activists in Rhode Island are still protesting that camp—just last month saw another round of demonstrations after ICE detained a Providence man who has lived in Rhode Island for nearly 50 years and currently serves as the primary caregiver for his nine-year-old autistic son. But I haven’t been involved in the campaign for some time, other than occasionally showing up to an action.
And that, Washington writes, is precisely the challenge: “Closing a detention center is rarely a single strike. It’s a siege.” It requires bringing a range of different tactics to bear, often over an extended period of time. Each tool on its own is probably insufficient, but together they can make operating a camp “more expensive—both politically and financially—and ultimately untenable.”
That, as I know from my own failure to stick with our local camp closure campaign over the long haul, can require uncommon commitment. Which is why I think the most important part of How to Close a Camp is the case it makes that this fight, of all the overwhelming barrage of horrors and injustices we face in this moment, is worth such prioritization.
The core problem with this system is not the most extreme examples of its barbarity, but rather the fundamental existence of immigration detention at all.Washington stresses a few points in particular to drive this message home. The hardest to read, of course, are the gut-wrenching stories of suffering and indignity experienced by the human beings caught up in this system: descriptions of human waste stagnating across a facility and detained people “resorting to desperate measures such as fasting in order to avoid defecating.” Examples of guards making hungry men eat with their hands shackled behind their backs—as one man said, “We had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs.”
But Washington is quick to remind us that the core problem with this system is not the most extreme examples of its barbarity but rather the fundamental existence of immigration detention at all. He urges readers not simply to oppose “a camp, not that camp, not a newly proposed camp or this particularly atrocious camp,” but rather to be against “camp as concept, against camp as practice—against all camps. Against locking people up because of where they were born or where they are.”
How to Close a Camp goes to great lengths to show that these structures do not just impact the people detained in them—they warp and degrade the realities of both the communities they inhabit and the people who fear ending up in them. Washington rebuts the false promises that get made to struggling towns about the economic development potential of these facilities, describing how, in reality, camps strain local services, suck up public resources, and create health risks for their neighbors. He also describes how they endanger the people around them. Immigrants in counties where ICE has the capacity to detain 50 people are more than twice as likely to be arrested than those in counties with no ICE camps. Immigrants in counties where ICE has at least 850 detention beds are six and a half times more likely to get arrested.
And that is not the only way a camp is a threat to those outside of it. Perhaps Washington’s most far-reaching point is that the camp poses a structural danger to our democracy. The thing about this form of detention is that it does not target someone because they committed a crime—rather, it targets someone because of who they are. And because it is—ostensibly—not designed to be punitive, the Supreme Court has ruled that it can be a mechanism for indefinite detention without the benefit of due process or trial by jury. In other words, the camp offers the state a profound loophole around our entire system of constitutional rights. And the populations targeted by this arbitrary system can shift and expand. ICE has already arrested hundreds of U.S. citizens (including dozens of children, two of whom had cancer). As Washington warns, “Once the infrastructure is built out, it is utilized.” How could such a system not grease the slippery slope to authoritarianism?
As Washington warns, “Once the infrastructure is built out, it is utilized.” How could such a system not grease the slippery slope to authoritarianism?Ultimately, How to Close a Camp’s foundational argument is that “the first and crucial step to closing a camp is being against the camp.” And on this point, the work’s timeliness really does matter. At one point in the book, Washington describes a 1993 Department of Justice report on prison riots that noted that “most inmates most of the time accept as legitimate the imprisonment of their fellow inmates.… In uncommon periods in history, however, these beliefs may be challenged. Once it is held that the criteria for imprisonment are arbitrary, it is a short step to the belief that rebellion is justified.”
We may be living through one of those uncommon periods in history. The cartoonish cruelty, corruption, and arbitrariness of the Trump administration’s approach to immigration detention has opened millions of Americans’ minds to the possibility that, just maybe, the very premise of the camp—that it is OK to imprison people simply because they were compelled to move to our country from somewhere else—is irredeemably arbitrary. How to Close a Camp is a powerful tool for helping readers take that last short step from this realization to rebellion.
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