How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention

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 bars 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.

"A moral manual, a rigorously researched guide to help readers fight back against this spreading evil."
--Greg Grandin

"An urgent, courageous book.... 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."
--Sarah Stillman

John Washington is a journalist covering the border, climate change, democracy, and more. He has written for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Intercept, and other outlets. He is the author of The Case for Open Borders and The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexico Border and Beyond. 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.