How to Close a Camp

new book about the immigration detention landscape

Got a new book coming.

I just signed with Haymarket to write about immigration detention centers, the history of detention in the United States (and elsewhere), and campaigns to shut down detention centers or stop new ones from being built.

Title: How to Close a Camp

Pub date: September 2026

Deadline: January 15 (!)

Which means I need to get steaming.

Framing

What kind of nation requires camps? What psychic or moral accommodations allow us to live alongside them? And what does it mean, not only to oppose such a system, but to seek to end it?

In How to Close a Camp I’ll distill strategies from successful campaigns that have closed camps, blocked new ones from opening, and chipped away at the carceral infrastructure. These efforts, often overlooked or mischaracterized as isolated protests, offer blueprints for abolitionist organizing rooted in direct action, local politics, and community power.

How to Close a Camp reveals how detention centers, while draped in the authority of federal jurisdiction, are deeply dependent on local complicity. County and city officials must sign contracts. State agencies must issue licenses. Local officials must approve land use permits, zoning variances, water hookups, and fire codes. Nurses and kitchen staff must be hired. Food vendors must deliver meals. Insurance policies must be underwritten. These mundane acts of bureaucratic consent are what keep a camp running. And they are what make it possible to shut them down.

In this moment of renewed carceral enthusiasm — the deepening militarization of the border and our cities, detention quotas, surveillance expansion — the stakes are not abstract. ICE has stated its ultimate goal of more than 100,000 detention beds, even as it offshores detention to Guantánamo, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Djibouti, and elsewhere.

Yet the end of detention does not lie in a distant utopia or the hands of enlightened legislators. It lies in the mundane and revolutionary work of refusal. County commissions can vote down contracts. Medical licenses can be revoked. Community resistance can make camps unprofitable, unstaffable, and politically radioactive. This is the story that has been lived across different American communities for decades, and in some cases going back more than a century. This is the story I’m investigating and writing in How to Close a Camp.

I’ll be focusing on detention and related shutdown campaigns, but I’m also touching ICE Watch groups, mutual aid, sanctuary, and more.

Help

And… I need your help. No book is written in isolation, and this one (and this fast: just four months to go!) relies on the support, experience, and research of a wide array of sources.

So if you have tips, ideas, contacts, stories, research nuggets, questions, suggestions, extra pens, or anything to share, I want to hear from you.

Do you have experience in or near camps? Are you a researcher, educator, attorney, organizer, activist, or rabble-rouser? I want to hear from you.

Do you have special knowledge about the immigration detention system, or surgical editing skills, and want to be an early reader? Let’s talk.

Do you remember some egregious story about life in a camp, or a victory about closing a camp? Do you know where some relevant historical gem is buried in the archives? Have you read or have you written some book or article I must read? Are you in an ongoing fight against a camp? Have you worked at a camp or know anyone who does or has? Please get to me. Please share this newsletter.

Do you have dollars to spare? You can pay for this newsletter. (Yes, Haymarket is paying me for the book, but I promise you don’t make bank writing radical books for medium-sized lefty presses.)

As always, you can respond to this newsletter, write me at johnbwashington@gmail.com, get to me via Signal at johnw.06, hit me up on Instagram or Bluesky (@jwashing.bsky.social).

Til then, my next four months are slammed. I’ll continue to share thoughts, updates, and essays via this newsletter, and let you all know how it’s coming.