An urgent polemic and practical guide to dismantling the immigrant detention system
Masked federal agents are kidnapping and killing our neighbors, on the streets and behind the gates of hundreds of detention centers across the country. In How to Close a Camp, award-winning journalist and translator John Washington offers a galvanizing, clear-eyed case for why we must close these camps—and how to do it.
In spite of the decades-long growth of immigrant detention, communities have been fighting back against camps—and winning. Washington distills strategies and lessons from successful campaigns to close camps and block or slow the opening of new ones, drawing on conversations with veteran organizers from the movement.
Chipping away at the infrastructure of the camp is the only way to stave off increasing xenophobic and authoritarian violence. It is time to close all the camps and build a world that no longer requires them.
John Washington is a staff writer at Arizona Luminaria, a community-focused media outlet where he writes about the border, climate change, democracy, and more. He has written for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Intercept, and other outlets. His first book, The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexico Border and Beyond, was published in 2020 by Verso Books. Washington is also a translator of books by Anabel Hernandez, Sandra Rodriquez Nieto, and others. His most recent translations include The Hollywood Kid by Óscar Martínez and Juan Martínez, and Blood Barrios by Alberto Arce, which won a PEN Translates Award. Both were co-translated along with Daniela Ugaz. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, and tweets @jbwashing.
Publication date: July 21, 2026
Introduction
Chapter One: History: From the 19th Century to the Rise of Mass Incarceration
Chapter Two: Lessons from Practitioners
Chapter Three: ICE Power-Mapping
Chapter Four: A Prison Town Says No – Lessons from Leavenworth
Chapter Five: But How to Close a Camp — and then What? — and a List of Questions to Ask of Camps
Chapter Six: LA and Chicago Push Back
Conclusion
Epilogue: What It Takes for a Camp to Exist: Adelanto as Example
“How to Close a Camp is critical reading for anyone trying to understand one of the defining cruelties of our time: the mass immigration detention centers that have sprung up across the country. Washington writes with clarity and urgency. His book is a moral manual, a rigorously researched guide to help readers fight back against this spreading evil.”
—Greg Grandin, author of America, América: A New History of the New World
“This is an urgent, courageous book. It is not just a comprehensive history of immigration detention camps as sites of social control and repression; it is also a compelling catalog of the many creative ways in which people have refused to be contained. Please read it, both to witness the vital stories that Washington captures with grace and rigor, and to study the moral blueprint it presents to us all, to help us account for and shape the kind of world in which we hope to live. What could be more needed than that?”
—Sarah Stillman, staff writer at The New Yorker
“John Washington has written an important and timely book: a thorough reckoning of ICE through a deep historical analysis of this long-standing yet somewhat unknown machine of terror, most starkly symbolized by its incarceration camps. Just as important, this book also vividly reports on the spirit of sustained and creative resistance that is needed to bring these camps down. A must-read.”
—Todd Miller, author of Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders
“Immigration prisons are a profitable spectacle of violence. Through a careful blend of on-the-ground reporting and thoughtful analysis, journalist John Washington traces the roots of policymakers’ choice to lock up migrants and brings to life the need—and possibility—of ending this type of human bondage.”
—César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, author of Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the “Criminal Alien”
