ICE Camps Are Not Untouchable. Here’s How Communities Can Push Back
“You can do something. It is within reach. You can have an effect,” says journalist John Washington.
"The immigration camp, it really depends on a lot of local infrastructure. It is not this untouchable federal abstraction. It is up to us, neighbors, community members, and we have the actual power to shut them down,” says journalist John Washington. In this episode of Movement Memos, John and I discuss his forthcoming book, How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention, the rapid expansion of ICE detention, and how communities can fight camps before and after they open.
Music: Son Monarcas and Sarah the Illstrumentalist
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This transcript was originally published in Truthout. It is reprinted here with permission.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to Movement Memos, a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about ICE detention camps, and about what it takes to close them — or stop them from opening in the first place.
The scale and speed of immigration detention expansion right now are hard to overstate. According to the American Immigration Council, ICE was detaining roughly 40,000 people when Trump took office, and that number had climbed to a record 73,000 by mid-January. By the end of November 2025, ICE was also using 104 more detention facilities than it had been using at the start of the year. The current push to convert warehouse facilities into so-called “processing centers” reflects Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons’ vision of a deportation system that functions “like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings.”
Documents reviewed by The Washington Post described plans for purchasing and converting 16 warehouses into regional processing centers that could hold 1,000 to 1,500 people each, and eight large-scale detention centers that could hold 7,000 to 10,000 people each.
But these numbers don’t capture the violent depravity of what’s being scaled up. As my friend Silky Shah, the Executive Director of Detention Watch Network, told me this week:
The detention system has always been inhumane, but the scale of expansion and neglect that has taken place in the last year has made it even more horrifying. Anywhere from 60,000 to 70,000 people are detained at any given time and roughly half a million people will be detained over the course of a year. The system has become even more deadly — 18 people have died in detention since the beginning of 2026. People in detention are being subjected to medical neglect, use of force, solitary confinement, retaliation, overcrowding, lack of food and clean clothing, and are frequently transferred from detention center to detention center cutting them off from their loved ones and support networks. In recent weeks immigrants have started hunger strikes at detention centers in New Jersey and California to protest the conditions and demand release.
Again, that update comes from Silky Shah of Detention Watch Network.
At least 48 people have died in ICE custody since Trump returned to office. This system seeks to punish, contain and dispose of detainees — while also terrorizing members of immigrant communities into leaving the US on their own. The promotion of so-called self-deportation is especially important to this administration, which is widely touting the myth that more than 2 million immigrants have self-deported under the Trump administration.
So, how can activists and organizers interrupt these fascist schemes? Today we’ll be hearing from John Washington, author of the forthcoming book How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention. In addition to engaging with insights featured in book, I’ll also be sharing some of what I’ve learned from our friends at Detention Watch Network about how to fight warehouse conversions. We’ll also talk about why language matters, what communities have done to slow or stop detention expansion, and why the fight against camps has to be tied to the fight for housing, health care, mutual aid, and communities that can actually keep each other alive.
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[musical interlude]
KH: John Washington, welcome to Movement Memos.
John Washington: Thanks so much for having me.
KH: How are you doing today?
John Washington: I’m good, and I also appreciate that you start with that question. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about and I think we need to check in with each other more, that if we let ourselves or let each other regularly burn out that this work that we’re doing, whether it activism, journalism, politics, care work, what have you, it’s going to be all the harder. I’ve absolutely been burned out a couple times in this past year. My cup was just running over and it was hard to keep pace. I think that needs to be part of the conversation, shouldn’t take over, but we need to be alert and strong and energized to respond right now and we can’t do that if we let each other run in the red for too long.
KH: Yes, and I know people roll their eyes sometimes when I ask, but I think how are you doing is a meaningful question, as long as we always welcome an honest answer. And on this show, we definitely do.
JW: How are you doing? Are you hanging in there?
KH: Today, I’m doing… okay. My back is aching, but the sun is shining, so I’ll take it.
JW: Yeah, there you go.
KH: Can you tell our listeners a bit about who you are and what you do?
JW: Yeah, sure. I’m a journalist and I’m based in Tucson. I work for a small local nonprofit media outlet called Lookout. We’re an accountability outlet that focuses on LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities. For them, for Lookout, I cover all sorts of stories, do a lot of immigration border stuff. Also cover the state house, county and state politics, jails, pretty much any story that’s important to our communities. I used to write for magazines more, and in the past five years, I’ve really grown to value and recognize the critical importance of local journalism. It’s something that has been gutted even more than other kinds of media over the past decades, and I’m really proud and psyched to be part of a burgeoning scene here in Arizona with a bunch of new, exciting, and innovative outlets. So that’s my professional life and how I approach a lot of the work that I was able to do and a lot of the background understanding I have for this book.
Another more personal bit is that I grew up in an immigrant community. My mother migrated from Romania when she was a teenager and settled in Northern Ohio. My community was really marked by stories of migration, my family, extended family, a lot of our friends. Migration was a really central part of their identities. When I came of political age [it] was at the same time I was having sort of a realization about the U.S.-Mexico border, starting to understand that that was something that was overlooked in the stories that I was hearing growing up pretty far from the border. I recognized it pretty quickly as an absolute moral catastrophe and that was simultaneous to me coming of age as a writer, and so I sort of sank into this role of writing a lot about border and immigration. I was also an activist for a number of years working with a number of migrant aid and migrant justice organizations in the U.S. and Mexico.
One other bit about me that I do some reflecting on in this book actually is that I’m also a translator and that’s actually one of the identities I feel I inhabit the most. I think that even if I’m not always doing acts of translation, like doing book translations or whatnot, I think of my nonfiction books as sort of acts of translation. The ideas aren’t so much mine, but I’m the presenter or synthesizer of them, and that’s something that I really try to do with this book, like translate either hard to understand legalese or some arcane political maneuverings or trends in history to something relatable, digestible that can be used as a tool. This is really what I try to present this book as, as an act of translation of this is how communities are organizing and have been responding to these attacks on communities for 130 years or so.
KH: I really appreciate your work as a local journalist. During Operation Midway Blitz here in Chicago, local reporting was essential. National media often didn’t have the local awareness to tell those stories accurately, or to keep up with what was happening across neighborhoods. If you really wanted to understand what was going on, you were relying on outlets like Block Club Chicago, Unraveled, Borderless, WBEZ, the Sun-Times, South Side Weekly, and the Chicago Tribune. The Tribune actually recently won a Pulitzer for its coverage, and I really read that as a recognition that some of the most meaningful coverage of these historic events has been happening at the local level.
I also appreciate the work you’ve done in How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention. Before we get into the mechanics of closing a camp, or preventing one from opening, I want to start with language, because the words officials use — “detention center,” “processing facility,” “temporary holding site” — can conceal a lot. And as Detention Watch Network has noted, even the label “processing center” can obscure the fact that a site is expanding detention capacity.
JW: There’s been an increasing debate around this issue. As a writer and as someone engaged in politics and closely watching politics, I think language is really important. I call them camps because I think that that term best describes the political function that they serve. What I mean by camp is I’m trying to name this system that is concentrating, immobilizing and excluding a certain population. I think we can just kind of glam onto this term, but I think unpacking it is really important. I spent a bit of time in the beginning of the book on doing this. I think it’s really important to understand what it is and how it functions, what it does, and why it’s distinct from a prison or a jail. So after thinking and reflecting a lot on this, I came up with a pretty concise definition. This is my approach to what an immigration camp is and it’s the carceral confinement and control of people deemed unwanted or, quote, unquote, out of place.
One of the main reasons why I’ve put so much thought into this is that I think that terms like “detention center,” which is one of the official terms or processing facility and other official terms, really sanitize what these places actually do. Again, trying to really think through this, what do they do? What actually happens inside of an immigration camp? I think in sort of the abstract, what they do is they strip people of legal personhood or at least diminish their legal personhood. That’s one of the main things that happens. They really take away people’s access to their legal rights. They immobilize them. They confine them. They reinforce a category or various categories of exclusion.
This is another really important part of it, they exist on a sort of a continuum of another or other forms of control. So you don’t have to be actually confined to the physical camp, in my understanding, to be consigned to its logic. So I argue that they exist in continuum with surveillance with alternatives to detention, electronic ankle shackles that monitor your precise whereabouts, or also offshore outsourcing and the increasing reliance on other nations to do the confinement for the United States.
One of the reasons I think it’s so important to think about this is that we need to use language right now that is revealing rather than concealing, especially given what we’re dealing with. These are places that are designed to disappear people politically before, and this is all too often the case, they’re disappeared actually or physically. So thinking hard about how we describe and define these places is really important.
KH: You write that disturbance, even horror, can be the catalyst that moves people into organizing to shut down ICE camps. In the campaigns you studied, how did people move from horror, outrage, or even just hearing about the cruelty of a camp, into some concrete role in shutting one down?
JW: Yeah, such a good question. People need to find ways to harness that dread. The initial reaction to seeing your neighbor or family member or whomever ripped out of their place in the community is often absolute outrage, is clenching your fist or screaming or venting to your family or posting about it online. I think in today’s digital age, that seems like a pretty natural response, but it’s obviously not enough. You need to harness that rage or harness that dread. I think what’s interesting here is that that dread or outrage itself is not enough, as I just said, but it’s also not really political. People really become politicized through participation, not beforehand. You see once some of these campaigns around the country get off the ground as you see people start to organize in different, more concerted ways, and really see their response as the spark towards a real politicization.
It can feel like screaming into the void sometimes, but I think what happens is once they do that organizing, people stop feeling overwhelmed, especially when they start through their community or their newly forged or forging community, they start understanding a little bit more how they can respond and what they can do. One of the other key points of this book is that you can do something. It is within reach. You can have an effect. The immigration camp, it really depends on a lot of local infrastructure. It is not this untouchable federal abstraction. It is up to us, neighbors, community members, and we have the actual power to shut them down. I think people feel less isolated and they can not just end with the dread and end with a nihilistic just outrage, but they can actually then take concrete steps to doing something.
One of the formulas I came up with thinking through this book, and this is something that I came to at the end, is that the opposite of a camp is community. You can have that moment of outrage or dread, but you need to then share it with other people, and that is the only way that you can actually really push back against the camp.
KH: I really appreciate that you emphasize in the book that camps are not inevitable. They are held together by contracts, permits, licenses, vendors, political relationships, infrastructure, and local decisions. How can organizers begin to see that machinery clearly enough to intervene?
JW: Yeah, that is something that there is a formula for basically. A lot of people are coming to this work fresh and are newly outraged because of the incredible excesses and the spectacles of violence that have been staged and waged by this administration. As I was saying in the last answer, it’s easy to just be pissed, but there are concrete things that can happen. Again, it’s not just this juggernaut. It is something that can be picked apart. I think one key point is that the camp infrastructure and even immigration enforcement itself really depends on local infrastructure. There are local city, municipal, county, and state pieces of how a camp is built in the first place and how it continues to function that can be sites of pushback.
So there are all sorts of licensing, permitting, zoning, medical service provision, food provision, staffing, environmental reviews, just the daily maintenance that goes in, inside and around the facility. All of these are points of vulnerability, and organizations like Detention Watch Network and some more local ones have been focusing on political pressure campaigns to try to stop it from being rezoned when a new camp is coming in, to force environmental review, which can either potentially stop or at least slow down a camp or just put a lot of pressure on the local politicians who may need to sign off on a permit and they all of a sudden see this camp coming in as a liability for their next election, or they’re just listening to their community and realize that their community doesn’t want this. So there’s all these very specific ways that people can respond. Again, there’s been something like a formula that has been developed over the years. You need to vary it. Things are changing so quickly right now in terms of immigration detention that our response also has to change.
In the book, I have a couple different appendices which spell out at great length a hundred or so very specific questions to ask about an individual detention site or camp that will really open up how many times people in your local community need to sign off, need to rubber stamp, need to say yes for this thing to actually function. Again, those are all points of vulnerability. Yet, as I said, it’s changing. So the warehouse model that’s being rolled out right now as we speak, a lot of these places may be run more and controlled more at the federal level than the local level. So that is going to change how people have to respond to them or the military camps like we see outside of El Paso and East Camp Montana. That too has different levels of accessibility, and so we’re going to need to respond. People are already very much doing that, but there are established ways to at least take these first steps.
KH: I really appreciated the appendices in your book. I know it’s easy for people to miss helpful additions like that. For example, a lot of people listening to this podcast have copies of Let This Radicalize You, and may not realize that Mariame Kaba and I included appendix sections on how to treat exposure to tear gas and pepper spray, and what to do if the FBI comes to your door. So, listeners, now you know — those are there, and don’t skip appendices.
And when it comes to the current expansion of the camp system, as you mentioned, things are changing fast. So I really want to highlight Detention Watch Network’s toolkit, DHS [Department of Homeland Security] Expansion of Immigration Detention into Warehouses, which outlines strategies for local and state interventions to stop the warehouse expansion of ICE camps. The toolkit breaks down points of intervention before a warehouse is purchased, after it’s purchased but before a camp opens, and after a camp is operational. I especially appreciate that it starts before purchase, because some of the most important work may be identifying who owns or finances the site before a deal quietly closes. The toolkit also offers core campaign demands — cancel the warehouse plan, reject public funding and local resources for detention expansion, and require transparency and community consent before any federal detention action. And it includes a running list of stopped or halted projects, as well as projects that are moving or pending.
I think it’s worth noting that this toolkit speaks directly to the current warehouse fight, while emphasizing many of the same interventions you discuss in the book: things like the zoning status of a project, triggering environmental impact reviews, and getting local officials to vocally oppose the project. One point the toolkit makes that feels especially important is that industrial zoning does not automatically mean detention is allowed. In some places, organizers may need to challenge the idea that a warehouse can simply be repurposed for detention without being treated as a carceral facility. So if you’re trying to counter a warehouse project, or you just want to be ready to oppose one if DHS tries to open a camp in your area, I really recommend examining the breakdown provided in this toolkit. It’s invaluable.
And speaking of getting local officials to oppose a project, I’ve been interested in what’s happening in Social Circle, Georgia, where city officials say DHS identified the proposed facility as one of eight “mega centers” planned nationwide. The Social Circle site would reportedly hold 7,500 to 10,000 people and employ as many as 2,000 to 2,500 staff, and raise major water and sewer concerns for residents in the area.
JW: Well, what’s interesting about that town is that is MAGA country. That town overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the last election, and yet they were up in arms as soon as this was announced. DHS didn’t even let them know. People in Social Circle learned after reporting from the Washington Post that this was a plan that they were going to put in this mega detention camp in their town. A lot of the people there were against it, even if they’re not necessarily against this idea of ICE or against this idea of mass deportations, and that is something given the political climate right now that people pushing back against camps need to embrace some form of NIMBYism. This is something that can again be harnessed and maybe this isn’t something that you will agree at all except for a very narrow issue with the people pushing back against the campus, say, in Social Circle, but this is a way to slow down this incredibly fast rollout of more and more detention, this incredible expansion.
When Trump came into office, there was 40-some thousand people locked up in immigration camps. We hit a record high of over 70,000 a couple months ago and their intent is to hit over 100,000. So any slowdown is not an ultimate win but will limit the number of people who can be detained, will limit the number of people who can be ripped away from their families and communities. So leaning into any place or color or flavor of pushback is a good idea, but you need to go much further than that too. Social Circle is one example. I think the last count is that there’s 12 sales of these huge warehouse centers that have been canceled in just the last couple of months. A lot of them were because a Republican politician was calling in a favor to DHS, but a number of others also have been slowed down at least by very rapid community response and pushback.
[And] close to where I am, there’s a purchase of a warehouse in the Phoenix suburb of Surprise, Arizona and they came through and DHS was ready to just barrel through and no bid contract, just like start refurbishing this empty warehouse into something to confine human beings. But the community pushed so hard that right now at least they’re scaling down and they haven’t started any of the actual refurbishing. It’s probably going to go forward. I mean, we don’t know. It may or may not, but there’s at least this pushback and now DHS or the federal government is least a little bit on their heels here and elsewhere as well.
KH: When you say community pushback, what does that actually look like on the ground?
JW: It looks like the response that communities have taken to being attacked for decades and more is people hit the streets. They start organizing. They show up to city town halls. They make signs. They start to get to know each other in a different way. They lean into different forms of organizing. A lot of the organizing that has happened throughout the country didn’t spawn out of nothing. It came from different groups and crews who had been organizing against attacks on their environment, against attacks on their unhoused populations, attacks of all manner. They’ve just stepped up and made a stink, and that stink may again not ultimately result in a complete win.
But I talked to a lot of people in a really interesting case in Leavenworth, Kansas. It’s like a quintessential prison town. I mean, the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth was the model federal prison for a hundred years. It is again, MAGA country. CoreCivic, one of the main private prison companies who has been dealing in the detention of migrants for a long time, they operated a prison in town for a while and it was the site of just horrific abuse. When CoreCivic announced that they were going to be reopening the facility as an immigration camp last year, shortly after Trump administration came back into office, the variety of people responding was really inspiring.
There were former prison guards, I talked to a number of them, who worked at the old facility and were just incredibly traumatized and scared that this place was going to reopen after all that they witnessed inside. There were nuns, the religious community. There were abolitionists. There were legal organizers. There was members of ACLU. There’s this incredible coalition of people [that] came together. Again, they didn’t share identical politics and some of them weren’t against ICE. They were against CoreCivic. Some of them weren’t against either ICE or CoreCivic. They just didn’t want it there. But there was a big tent approach to how they were going to start pushing back. It looks like they’re not going to win actually, but they probably have delayed the opening by at least a year and the fight isn’t completely over yet.
Even if it ultimately opens, they have still mobilized and energized and organized their community in a new way and they know each other better, they trust each other better and they’re not going away. That isn’t going away or that’s the plan at least is to continue pushing back against that and also other attacks against the community. In some of the door knocking that they did, some of the abolitionists from Kansas City came in to just offer their services, and they did a lot of door knocking just to ask people where they stood in the issue. A lot of people didn’t know what was going on or were scared about what was going on, but has had some misperceptions about it. They had conversations with people and really laid out not only the problems with CoreCivic and not only problems with this particular facility, but the immigration enforcement regime and they started just getting to know each other and bringing people in that may not have otherwise been any part of this organizing at all.
KH: You write about the importance of following the paper trail. What kinds of records, public processes, or use classifications can help organizers identify the weak points that keep a camp operating, or allow one to open in the first place?
JW: That’s a tricky question. In some regard, following the paper trail will inform you and really I think elucidate how these places work. It’s something that is an essential piece of pushing back against the camp, but there’s such a rapid and forceful attempt to open these places that even if you find something that is a failed inspection or a missed permit, the idea that this administration is trying to go through all of the bureaucratic or legal hoops just doesn’t really hold up.
It’s not necessarily going to bring about a shutdown, and this is going back to something I was talking about earlier. I think what it really does is it reveals how many people had to say yes. So the opening and then the ongoing function or operation of an immigration camp depends on consistent and persistent approval. If you start finding any vulnerability and any moment or any person who can start disapproving or start pushing back, you’re throwing sand in the gears and that is potentially one way to start a shutdown. This example I’m about to give isn’t precisely about a camp, but I think it reveals the approach that I’m talking about here.
I talked to some really inspiring organizers in Vermont who were following ICE operations and trying to understand how they were arresting people where they were taking them and how they were then transporting them for deportation or just transfer to another facility. They realized that the Burlington Airport was a key piece of ICE’s operations because they didn’t have enough bed space in Vermont. They had to transfer people out often to the Boston area or elsewhere. They saw that they had these contracts with the airport. It’s a small town. It’s a small state. They also realized that these are humans that they live nearby or next to that they can start having conversations with.
So they just approached the airport personnel. They started going to some of the meetings that these airport overseers had and they were able to identify the people who were making this decision to allow ICE to operate this way. They pushed back and they won. And ICE had to stop using the Burlington Airport. They went to a different nearby airport. They did the same thing there and they again won. They just had to really start figuring out how to maneuver in a different way to avoid the community who all of a sudden was previously acquiescing or just saying yes or rubber stamping, and all of a sudden just a little bit of conscientiousness or politicization and they started pushing back. They cost ICE a lot more money and they just slowed down their operations there.
KH: I really appreciate that example, because I think it really illustrates that ICE’s power is not simply floating above our communities. It is moving through local institutions, local relationships, and local routines — and those are things people can learn to understand and disrupt.
You wrote that Dean Spade told you one of the biggest problems in our society is that most people don’t know how to connect to and do meaningful work in their community. What kinds of skills are missing there, and how can people begin to build them?
JW: Yeah. Dean Spade and some others that I spoke with whose work I really appreciate and I encourage people to read his book on mutual aid, talks about mutual aid being a building block of any transformation of society or any creation of society as well, and this idea that we need to be there for each other and rely on each other, two sides of the same coin, is really important, and it’s something that is one of the most elemental pieces and yet can often be overlooked when you start doing this kinds of organizing.
Going to zoom out a little bit. So the incredible inspiring, just valiant work that we’ve all witnessed in Minneapolis or in Chicago or in L.A. and elsewhere, this incredible pushback by the community to ICE operations, to border patrol, to the Army or Marines coming into towns, all of that is something that was an emergency response, absolutely crucial, and again, just really inspiring work. But a lot of it came about also because of this simultaneous work on mutual aid. This is where while people fending off ICE or trailing ICE or filming ICE got a lot of the media attention because they were out in the streets and they were more visible.
At the same time, there was a lot of work being done behind the scenes to offer food to people who needed it, to offer emotional support, to offer schooling in some cases, to offer these basic forms of protection or just these fulfilling these basic needs of people, and that is work that needs to be sustained beyond even after the cameras move on. It is also the core of what is going to not only push back against these really ostentatious moments of spectacular violence, but be more long-term sustainable efforts at building something different.
This is another one of the key theses of the book is that we can push back against immigration camps and we should and we can, and we are, but unless you replace them with something different, we’re not going to get an ultimate win. There’s a couple different ways of seeing this. One is we have pushed back and we have won and we have shuttered camps. There’s some infamous ones that I’ve done a lot of reporting on in the past, Etowah in Alabama, Irwin in Georgia. A number of other places or a handful of other places rather have shut down during the Biden administration, and yet they were shuddered, but then they’ve been reopened. Dilley is another one that got a lot of attention, this so-called family detention center. Unless we are able to either demolish those places or build something better in their stead, they are always going to remain a threat. When the next administration comes in, they could be reopened.
So, going back to your initial question about Dean Spade and mutual aid, the way that we build something different is through those elemental building blocks that really start at a hyperlocal level. Another person I talked to, the [co-]author of Abolish Rent, Leonardo Vilchis, he really emphasizes the importance of building by building organization. This is where you are organizing with your immediate neighbors, and that is the only way that you’re going to be able to build actual transformative change. If you’re just doing this emergency response stuff and you’re not then also committing to the long haul and committing to getting to know to being therefore and relying as well on your neighbors, you’re not going to be able to build this grassroots more transformative concept or vision or that it’s going to draw in more people and it’s going to actually ultimately and permanently replace something like the camp.
KH: I really want to note, from my own experience, that I believe community defense is a form of mutual aid. It’s direct action, but it’s also mutual aid, because it’s about meeting a community need, and it’s a project for collective survival. And there’s a longstanding overlap between direct action and mutual aid, particularly where actions that help people stay alive and unincarcerated are criminalized.
But to your point about people focusing on folks who were out in the streets, chasing ICE or filming ICE, and not always recognizing that there was this whole system of mutual aid happening — I think that was only ever true from the outside looking in. Because if you were participating in those efforts in Chicago or Minneapolis, you knew the more confrontational tactics and the behind-the-scenes care work were inextricably bound. If people aren’t safe going to work, or walking their kids to school, or going to the store, how are they sustained? How do people meet their needs while living in hiding? Where do people go if they suddenly need to get off the street?
There was a whole ecosystem of care happening. And while I, as someone who was out in the streets filming ICE and doing whatever else needed doing, was removed from some of that work operationally, for opsec reasons, I was aware of that care work. I was also offered care, because people taking risks and engaging with traumatic situations needed support, too.
As Shane Burley and I have discussed on the show, if you want sustained, society-altering mass participation in direct action, you also need mass participation in mutual aid. And in this case, I don’t think there’s a real separation between the two.
The tricky part is making some of this infrastructure last, and keeping it nimble and adaptable. In my own conversations with folks from the LA Tenants Union last year, I was really moved by their description of how people who supported their neighbors during rent strikes also mobilized in response to other crises, like people needing food during the early pandemic, or people responding to the LA fires. So I think some of the lines of communication, networks of solidarity, and relationships people have cultivated in resistance to the [Greg] Bovino-style ICE attacks — where roving gangs of ICE agents were besieging neighborhoods — have a much broader potential.
We can respond to climate disasters with care, communication, and responders on the ground, and we can respond to other emergencies arising from fascism, policing, and state violence. But we need to think about how to sustain some of these networks, and how to make space for skill-building and adaptation.
Engaging with people’s visions about what could happen, what they’re afraid of, what they won’t tolerate, and how we’re willing to prepare or show up for each other in response to those emergencies is a really important step. Like, now that we’ve found each other, now that we’ve seen our collective potential, how else could we show up for each other? I hope a lot of people are having those conversations — including in cities where folks were bracing for the kind of fascist violence that happened in Chicago and Minneapolis, but maybe didn’t see that violence manifest in the same ways. Because we know the potential for collective action exists, so why not engage with possibilities, and figure out what it would mean to be present for each other in other ways, and who might want to be activated under those conditions, or under ongoing conditions? Obviously, some people are already doing that, or have already done it, but I want more of us to do it, because that kind of adaptability is going to help us move in the right directions.
Which also brings me back to the kind of world people want to live in. When you talk about getting rid of the camp, or the concept of the camp, and putting something better in its place, how can people get more clarity around what that “something better” might be?
JW: Well, what do communities need right now? That depends on each specific community. But there’s another case that I was looking very closely at in Torrance, New Mexico. It’s a rural small town and they have been transformed over the past while into a prison town. The prison town or the immigration camp, it provides jobs, provides some taxes, provides this idea of stability. However, it could shut down. It has almost shut down the past. Right now, the New Mexico governor early this year signed a bill to limit how these detention facilities can license themselves or contract with the federal government. So this place that has been reliant on or dependent on this camp for a while, it might go away.
What does the community need in its stead? Well, there’s no hospital. There’s not even a substantial urgent care in this town. People have to drive over an hour to receive necessary care. There aren’t enough community centers in this town. There could be more schools. These are some of the visions that people had. The ACLU of New Mexico, Innovation Law Lab, a couple other organizations did a listening project in this town saying, “Okay. How do you feel about the detention camp?” That’s one of the basic questions or ways that they ask the question. The other is, “What do you actually want? What do you value about this town?”
People talked about this rural ranching dire need for medical services, and the medical service or hospital could also provide jobs, could also treat people that need medical services in the town. So trying to think about actually what the needs of a community are can only be answered at the local level, but just one example of there are desperate needs for things that are not extractive, that are not just a new national retailer coming in. National retailers, the Walmarts, the Dollar stores, they actually have a lot in common with immigration camps or prisons that they come in, they promise jobs. They promise bright new funds that are going to be spread out through your community, but they don’t actually work. There’s been long-term studies about prison towns that show that they actually deplete businesses. They traumatize the population, not just the people held inside but people who work there. They drive away businesses and they’re not truly a reliable form of tax revenue in the long term.
KH: I really appreciate what you’re saying. I remember visiting Logan Correctional Center in Illinois a couple of years ago, and being told by a guard that the prison was understaffed because people didn’t want to work there — and this is in Logan County, Illinois, which isn’t exactly overflowing with opportunities. Logan has since been slated for closure because the women imprisoned there are living in torturous conditions, and there’s a campaign called No New Prisons Illinois that’s working to prevent the construction of two new prisons. Because instead of reshuffling imprisoned people into new cages, we should be setting more people free. And instead of spending money on prisons, we should be investing in health care, including mental health care, and other major community needs — the kinds of things states have been defunding for decades as prison infrastructure has expanded.
We don’t need mass investment in better prisons. We need mass investment in our communities.
And I think that’s really related to the idea that we aren’t striving to make camps better employers, or better neighbors, or better-managed institutions. The goal is to make something else possible. In the book, you warn that reform can sometimes stabilize the camp rather than undermine it. How can activists fight immediate abuses inside detention while refusing the idea that a more humane camp is the answer?
JW: Yeah. I mean, first, people need immediate relief right now inside. People are dying at a higher rate than we’ve ever seen before. People are suffering. There’s just more people in, so there’s more suffering. The use of force has gone up. There’s a recent Washington Post piece showing that the use of force inside these detention facilities has spiked in the last year. People need to respond to this moment. So I think that that sort of immediate reaction, if you’re going to call that reform, is something that is not to be overlooked. However, historically, though we’re in this moment of crisis, historically we need to also see long-term, even as we’re responding to the conflagration that is happening right now.
I think of this really great formulation from Michelle Castañeda, whose book Disappearing Rooms I read very carefully as I was researching this, and she wrote that reform trains us to notice atrocities while ignoring the atrocity of incarceration itself. I think looking at the fight against the prison-industrial complex that has been happening for decades, there is a danger that reform could reinforce the legitimacy of something, that it can actually stabilize the system’s power rather than reduce the system’s power, so you have to have this simultaneous… This is really hard work. You have to have the simultaneous short-term response to respond to people’s immediate needs and you have to see beyond this administration, beyond the next two years, four years and further to really think about how we are going to dismantle and then replace this system. This goes back to the earlier question. I think the only way to do that is to build community power from the bottom up. That is a true idea of grassroots movement organizing.
KH: The campaigns you describe often depend on relationships across bars — with detained people, their loved ones, local residents, faith communities, abolitionists, lawyers, journalists, and national organizations. What makes those relationships politically powerful, and what can weaken them?
JW: So the campaigns that have had the most success almost always start with the people who have been locked up behind those bars, or at least have been very directly coordinated with those people. I spoke with a number of folks who were locked up in immigration camps and became organizers on the inside and remain organizers or remain active now on the outside. There’s Johannes Favi based in Chicago area, Juan Castillo, who I’ve been in touch with and reporting on and with for five years or so at this point. These people both are able to… The people who are actually behind the bars are able to express their urgent needs in a way that we can’t know exactly because things are always changing and these are often black boxes. It’s really hard even as reporters, even as researchers, even now as members of Congress to really get inside and understand them.
So understanding and realizing what is happening inside is essential and also realizing what our actions, how they have effects on people inside is essential. So establishing those relationships is one of the first things that should happen when you’re expressly fighting against an existing camp and also being open to the… Again, going back a little bit to a previous answer, going being open to a variety of political orientations. You can’t build enough power to shut down a camp if you’re waiting for everyone to share your identical politics and the people who are inside maybe have such an urgent need that they’re just focused on that. But being able to talk to enough people and identify the pattern and start building a campaign around what that experience is, is I think both the obvious and essential moral first step, but it’s also the way that you really start pulling on people’s heartstrings.
The local politician who maybe had to sign off on some permit a year or two ago, once they really start realizing that human impact, not just the political outrage, I think is when you’re going to start seeing a change of mind a little bit and start seeing a crack in this sort of facade of, “This is just the way things are. This is the status quo. We can’t do anything about it.” It’s going to be those stories of people who are actually inside that it’s going to start breaking that down.
KH: I appreciate something you said about not waiting for everyone to have our same politics. In the book, and here, you talk about people who oppose a camp not because they’re aligned with us around immigration or detention in general, but for very specific reasons in defense of their community — like the situation in Georgia, where there are major water and sewer concerns.
I think the left often struggles with that kind of alignment. We have to carry a long-term vision of freedom, and keep pushing for housing, health, land, care, and community. But there will also be battles where we have to work alongside people who simply share one critical objective in the moment.
We saw a version of that in Chicago during Operation Midway Blitz, when a lot of longtime organizers were suddenly working alongside thousands of newly activated people whose politics were not always radical, or even coherent. There were real tensions, but the immediate stakes were clear: People were being abducted from our neighborhoods, and we needed as many people as possible trying to stop that harm.
How should organizers think about those kinds of temporary or partial alignments when they’re trying to stop a camp?
JW: Well, it’s something that comes up. I’ve gone to a lot of public meetings. I mentioned already the proposed warehouse camp in Surprise, Arizona. There’s another newly proposed facility. It would be refurbishing, dusting off of an old state prison to an immigration camp in the town of Marana, which is just north of Tucson. I’ve gone to a lot of these meetings and the people who stand up and talk to their local officials against these camps are definitely not always on the left. They will admit that they were Trump voters. They will say that they’re proud Republicans and yet they don’t want to see human suffering in their communities or they say at least they don’t want to see it.
They aren’t necessarily against the idea of a camp, but they don’t want the fallout, and that could be a loss of tax revenue or it could be just more traffic in a certain part of their town and that’s why they’re against the camp. I think that recognizing that their voice actually could be part of the reason that a local official could be won over is important. We have to think strategically. Ideological purity probably isn’t going to get us to where we need to be and to be able to shut down these camps, and also being willing to have conversations with these people or be willing to hear them out with the ultimate goal of having them hear you out.
This idea of Compact Theory with political ideas, laying out exactly what it is you believe in and being clear about it can win some people over. This is something I talked and wrote a lot about in my last book, The Case for Open Borders, which is that we can’t just be on the defensive and we need to lay out a positive vision for what we want immigration policy to be, that we believe in this idea of human mobility, the freedom of movement for all, that we don’t think that people should be arrested, caged, tortured, banished, or killed because of where they were born or what color their passport is.
Having that moral clarity and leading on principle about what you believe is, I think, a way to connect with other people. Even if they don’t agree or they won’t vote for the same person that you may or aren’t going to be on your side on every issue, letting them hear that and I think it is a really key thing to both sort of galvanizing the left base or the progressive base and also not alienating people who may be interested or maybe aren’t ready to jump in all the way but are willing to take a couple steps towards pushing back against a new camp or shutting down a current one. Being open and being willing to work in coalition, I think, is one of the key bits.
I’m talking about bridging the political divide right now, but there’s also this importance of coalitional building on the left. This is something we’ve already kind of talked about a little bit, but it can’t be just immigration-focused or it can’t be just camp-focused. We need to work with the tenants unions and the environmental defenders, the anti-data center folks. There’s so much overlap between this expansion of immigration camps and this rapid attempt to roll out all these data centers. Trans rights activists, safe streets advocates, all these are different groups that should be working together. If you’re going to not only shut down this camp or respond to this characteristic of this fascist or proto-fascist attempt to divide people to shore up this populist movement or whatever, you need to work in coalition with all the other people who are both being attacked and are trying to proffer a better way of doing things.
KH: I really appreciate that. I think this gets at something a lot of us have to get better at. A lot of organizing now begins with people self-selecting into a fight because they care about an issue, or because it matches their politics. I think people are really accustomed to that dynamic: They call a march, and if people care about the issue, they show up. But with place-based organizing, we’re engaging with people who share conditions, whose lives are being shaped by the same threat, or who may have a stake in obstructing the same project — even if they’re not arriving with our analysis.
An old friend of mine used to canvas around anti-extraction issues in Republican areas in rural Southern Illinois, and he would say that a lot of people he talked to didn’t care about “the environment” in the abstract, but they cared about their environment. They cared if pollution might give them cancer, or poison their groundwater, or harm their family, and those concerns gave him a jumping off point.
So I think we have to think more expansively about where opposition can come from, and not write off the potential for communities or community members to obstruct DHS or the administration just because we don’t have the same politics. When talking to people who are not going to respond to rhetoric that people like you or I might respond to, what kinds of concerns should organizers highlight? What kinds of questions should they ask?
JW: I think one thing that is really important here is to really underscore that what happens inside of a camp is not isolated to the physical boundaries of it and that the way that ICE operates, the way that local law enforcement operates, the way that the community is affected much more broadly than the specific physical confines of the camp are huge, that this is going to affect your community, and if we allow this major expansion of the camp system… Detention capacity of the highest number I’ve seen proffered is 108,000. 108,000 would be by far the largest immigration camp system anywhere in the world and far larger than anything else this country’s seen.
What does that mean? What does that actually do to this concept of the nation and this broader national community? I think that this is one further and critical step along the way to more policing that will absolutely not be limited to just the so-called other or to someone who doesn’t have the right documentation. We are absolutely already seeing this. We’ve been seeing this for a long time the way that immigration enforcement through checkpoints in Southern Arizona and other places along the U.S.-Mexico border, roving patrols, the just violence exhibited and enacted in our cities. All of this is allowed or is permitted because of the camp expansion, because if they don’t have places that put people, then they’re not going to be able to do these other types of enforcement. So making sure that people understand the impacts are not limited to just supposed non-citizens, like everyone is going to be affected.
I think underscoring that urgent appeal is going to bring in some of those people who maybe aren’t on your exact political side or don’t align exactly with you politically and realize that there is the amount of money that has been allocated for this system. Just for camps, $45 billion over four years, for $170 billion in last summer’s reconciliation bill at One Big Beautiful Bill. For border and interior enforcement, $170 billion. What could that money do otherwise? This [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth’s dream of a trillion-dollar defense budget, what could that money do? I think that if you just ask that question to people, they’ll have lots of ideas because there’s so many other needs that are being ignored right now.
The problem with affordable housing, the problem with access to health care… look, these are some of the core issues that are not being addressed that the federal government is unwilling to really try to solve, that trying to think about how a more local approach to identifying a need and advocating for a need can really turn the conversation into what are we spending our resources on? It’s to lock up people and that is going to have all these impacts I was just talking about or to address the most basic needs of ourselves and our neighbors. I think that sort of big picture kind of approach can really start pushing the conversation and potentially even winning some people who are interested or curious with anti-camp work.
KH: In your book’s conclusion, you write:
Historically, political organizing in the United States has been too inconsistent, too single issue, and simply not powerful enough to break through towards systemic and lasting change, not just to combat a single ICE incursion or operation, but to abolish the agency and what it stands for, the selective policing of human mobility.
What kind of organizing are you calling for here?
JW: What I’ve been describing throughout this conversation, really local to begin with, grassroots building by building, to quote Leonardo Vilchis again, sustainable community power building. I think what the question provokes in me is this thought about what winning looks like? What does success here look like? I think there is a danger in the United States to having short-term or small successes. Here I’m thinking, “Okay. Again, the inspiring work that happened in Minneapolis and elsewhere, do we count that as a win?” Yeah, Bovino and [Kristi] Noem got sacked. They are no longer, or at least currently are not rolling out major blitzes of militarized enforcement operations.
But here’s a key thing to put this in perspective is over the same period that Metro Surge just unleashed violence on Minneapolis, there were actually more immigration arrests in four other major metropolitan areas. The immigration enforcement can be bureaucratized and made more efficient in a way that does not produce spectacle. It is very hard for people to be energized and enraged enough to organize around that kind of bureaucratic enforcement where USCIS [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services] or local jails or local law enforcement are much more quietly or on by one picking people off. It’s hard to respond to that. There’s not an obvious face or this obvious “enemy” out in the streets that you can respond to.
So the organizing, to answer your question, the organizing I think that people are calling for is where people are really understanding the local dynamics and are able to respond to the less spectacular forms of immigration enforcement and are able to build and try to work on a system where they can actually convince their local agencies not to perform immigration enforcement, not to cooperate the same way. That has limited ultimate effect. I mentioned the formula that I came up with in this book that’s like the opposite of camp is community. What a camp does is it divides us. It’s divisive in nature.
When communities are tightly enough bonded together, when you stand shoulder to shoulder really with your neighbors, there’s not room for the camp to come in, and so it has to be this sustainable long… It has to be sustainable neighbor-to-neighbor approach where you’re actually in it for the long haul and not on a single issue where a win isn’t going to be kicking Trump out of office if he goes for a third term in two years, is not going to be winning the midterms, is not going to be a win. I’m doing scare quotes here. Or even pushing back against Noem and Bovino, as I said, is not going to be the ultimate win. The ultimate win is what? Creating a system, creating a community that can thrive, where people are not under threat because they originally came from somewhere else or because they’re seeking safety or because they want to reunite with their families. That is the ultimate win and I think it can only be achieved through really sustained long-term grassroots organizing.
KH: I also want to underscore for listeners that short-term victories are happening. Detention Watch Network’s toolkit includes warehouse projects that have already been stopped or halted in places like Hutchins, Texas; Ashland, Virginia; Kansas City, Missouri; Salt Lake City, Utah; Byhalia, Mississippi; and the Twin Cities region, where public pressure and local opposition helped stop or complicate potential deals. So even amid this terrifying expansion, there are already examples of people making these projects harder, slower, and in some cases impossible to carry out. I urge everyone to check out the Detention Watch Network’s toolkit and to preorder John’s book, How to Close a Camp, so that we can all be more prepared to do our part, and to help others navigate this work.
John, I want to thank you so much for making time for this conversation. I appreciate your work and I’m grateful for the opportunity to think alongside you.
JW: Yeah, thanks so much, Kelly. I really appreciate it.
KH: I would also like to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
Show Notes
- How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention by John Washington
- Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba
- Disappearing Rooms: The Hidden Theaters of Immigration Law by Michelle Castañeda
