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“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, Washington joins host Kelly Hayes to discuss his 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

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

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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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........

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