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.

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?

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.