“Closing a Detention Center Is Rarely a Single Strike. It’s a Siege.”

John Washington’s How to Close a Camp is a practical guide to opposing ICE and a strong moral argument for action.

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........

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