Britta Shoot Prism
Journalist John Washington’s new book explains how fighting and closing detention centers is critical in the larger battle to stop immigration enforcement
Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, dozens of immigrants have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. Between January and July 6 this year, at least 21 individuals have died in federal custody.
In January, during ICE’s siege in Minneapolis, agents with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) killed community defenders Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two of at least 11 individuals killed by DHS agents since the start of Trump’s second term. While there was a brief decline in ICE activity after the high-profile Minneapolis murders, the ICE’s surge of violence has mostly continued unabated. This includes the July 7 killing in Texas of 52-year-old father of three, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and the July 12 killing in Maine of 26-year-old father, Joan Sebastian Guerrero.
In this era of cascading violence, journalist and translator John Washington offers a clear-eyed assessment of how communities can fight back. His new book, “How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention,” is out now from Haymarket Books.
Washington has long reported on immigration and penned two previous books about migration and asylum. In “How to Close a Camp,” he is careful to explain that the U.S. didn’t arrive at this moment abruptly, connecting the history of slavery—the first camps were ships, he argues—to the Obama-era emergence of detention centers with airstrips integrated to hasten deportations. The book is both a short, uncompromising history of state violence against migrants, and a straightforward action guide to fighting immigrant detention.
“How to Close a Camp” outlines concrete, multipronged approaches to interrupting immigration enforcement, as well as slowing or stopping the construction and operations of detention centers. Washington offers examples for almost anyone of any political experience or skill level of how to assist and resist: from identifying and warning of the presence of ICE agents with whistles to recording ICE raids, abductions, and shootings. The book also highlights useful case studies of how to thwart ICE using bureaucracy and the legal system, such as the Illinois Way Forward Act, a state law intended to prevent ICE arrests at courthouses.
In late June, Washington spoke to Prism about his decision to refer to detention centers as “camps,” the consequences of Congress’ decision to provide federal immigration agencies with unprecedented funding, and the wildly divergent groups working in coalition to stop the construction of new detention centers.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Britta Shoot: Obvious but vital first question: Tell us about the word “camp.”
John Washington: I decided to use the word “camp” because I think that is the best description of the function that immigration detention centers—the more common term—actually serve. Camps concentrate, immobilize, and exclude populations. Prisons and jails incarcerate people because of what they have done or are alleged to have done. And camps incarcerate people because of who they are or where they are.
The language here is really important because what I’m trying to do is not let these facilities or the people behind them conceal what is happening. That is a real danger. When the workings of these camps are concealed, that helps to conceal the people. People are disappeared in these places, sometimes for very long periods, including when they’re deported to a single country or even a series of other countries. We need to use language that exposes rather than acquiesces that concealment or disappearance.
Prisons and jails incarcerate people because of what they have done or are alleged to have done. And camps incarcerate people because of who they are or where they are.
Shoot: Why do you think you’re so comfortable using extreme language to describe the extreme circumstances of this era?
Washington: I’ve been covering borders and immigration for over a decade. A lot of that work has been reporting on immigration camps for The Intercept and The Nation. I reported on how detention centers were vectors for COVID-19 spreading internationally, as well as domestically. I broke some big stories about the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia, where a doctor was accused of unnecessary gynecological procedures and where ICE was very clearly working to cover up some of the accusations, including deporting witnesses.
Border violence is something that I’ve been attuned to for a long time, and in large part, I think comes out of my own personal history. I grew up in an immigrant community in northern Ohio. My mother is a de facto refugee from Romania. She came to the United States as a teenager, fleeing flares of totalitarianism. Back when I started reporting on these issues, I think there was more hesitancy to call out the extraordinary harms being directed at a very focused population.
A lot of the thinking I was doing for my previous book, “The Case for Open Borders,” centers on how we have taken pretty significant strides in the last century to try to protect different classes of people who are targeted because of who they are: queer people, women, people of color. Major international movements, including the U.S. civil rights movement and the women’s rights movements, try to buoy these people, further protect them, and welcome them further into society. But one group of people that has not been included in some of those mobilizations and movements are migrants, and they, too, can’t help where they were born. They, too, deserve the rights we all deserve.
Shoot: Even as the book was going to press, its urgency kept building. On June 10, Congress voted for another $70 billion in funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection.
Washington: Those dollars are gasoline on the fire.
Last summer, the immigration enforcement regime received $70 billion [as part of the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill]. Forty-five billion [of that 2025 funding] was dedicated specifically for this blitz of construction, purchasing warehouses, re-outfitting existing facilities, and expanding detention at breakneck speed to the unprecedented levels we hit earlier this year. Their goal was to hit or surpass 100,000 people detained in 2026. And they haven’t reached that. At one time, 70,000 people were detained. It’s dipped a little bit, and I think that is no small part because of extensive community resistance. But this recent funding will help them.
This funding only passed after a major delay and a partial government shutdown due in large part to the ICE murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Despite some bipartisan concern, there were no major reforms to how ICE operates or new oversight bodies created, and yet the funding came. This points to a pervasive political amnesia that we forget very quickly, and we habituate to horrors and extremes.
More broadly, the response by immigration prison regimes to the international outcry against those two murders was to do their work more quietly and more efficiently. This is a key innovation of the second Trump administration: It’s not the level of cruelty, it’s the level of efficiency. For six months, they were ostentatiously cruel with these named
operations and cities: Midway Blitz, Metro Surge, etc. But one of the key points I try to make in the book is that exhibitionist enforcement is not essential to the ultimate goal of mass deportation, of targeting people because of who they are, where they are, and filtering out the so-called unwanted of the society. They don’t need to do that. They don’t need to storm-troop and descend from Apache helicopters. Immigration detention camps are essential. They are a linchpin. None of this could be happening without bed space.
Shoot: You profiled a radically diverse group fighting a new camp proposed in Leavenworth, Kansas: former prison guards, Catholic nuns, immigration advocates, and students. How is their fight against private prisons giant CoreCovic progressing, and what can other communities learn from their coalition?
Washington: It looks like ICE and CoreCivic may get their way. There was a ruling and permit issued earlier this year to make that facility operational. But it hasn’t happened yet. And as long as it hasn’t, there’s always hope.
People mobilized very quickly and built a politically broad coalition, including with people who are not against ICE, writ large, but are against CoreCivic or just against what would happen in that specific facility. Theirs is a model to be followed. If you’re just trying to organize with people who are in a very narrow sector of an ideological spectrum, you’re not going to be able to get enough done.
There are too many people who maybe don’t understand or share your politics—and who never will—but who are essential to pushing back against this regime. Unless you can convince the broad public, you can’t really make broad-scale societal change, which I think is what is absolutely needed. We need people who have the level of analysis and historical understanding to call for open borders and complete abolition, but we can’t only rely on those people.
Shoot: Leavenworth is also an important case study because an old prison is being repurposed as a detention center. What should we aspire to build instead?
Washington: Shuttering these facilities isn’t enough. When that infrastructure is in place, it can be used.
The reason to target detention is because these are fixed, local, vulnerable sites. And that vulnerability is something that can be missed. These facilities are highly dependent on local actors: local politicians, local infrastructure, and local workers. There are very clear actionable ways to stop them: going to city council and county supervisor meetings, convincing your politicians, and understanding the mechanisms of how they work. All of these things—what sort of permits, licenses, and accreditation are required—are pretty readily understandable. Remove a couple of those pieces, and these facilities can’t be built or can’t operate. You don’t have to take on Congress or the Department of Homeland Security. You can engage and win these fights at the local level.
What to build in place of these institutions will be particular and idiosyncratic to whatever is going on in your local town. But broadly speaking, many communities lack basic community centers, and their libraries are under attack and underfunded. And there are so many rural communities that are health deserts.
If you compare the community impact of camps and healthcare, it’s not like you’re weighing two equal options. Hospitals make money and pay taxes. And we know—and I spend a lot of time in the book addressing—immigration detention camps, prisons, and jails are not long-term moneymakers. They deplete the economies of small towns. They traumatize locals who work there. They scare people. In the Phoenix suburb of Surprise, Arizona, they’re trying to retrofit a warehouse to turn into an immigration camp, and people live 100 yards away from it. There’s a middle and high school a mile away. It’s a Latino community. People are afraid of being targeted.
There are clear harms that happen with an ICE camp in your vicinity. Ultimately, none of us want that. We all want our communities to be enriched, not harmed.
Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor
Britta Shoot is a journalist based in San Francisco. She’s written for Time, The Guardian, and The New Yorker and is writing a book about early HIV/AIDS activists.
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