When residents of Surprise found out earlier this year that a massive immigration detention and processing center was planned to go into a 400,000-square-foot warehouse in their city, they pushed back.
Republicans and Democrats alike were concerned about the lack of notice from the federal government and strains on the city as a result.
It’s just one example of the kind of pushback to immigration detention centers that John Washington highlights in his newest book, “How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention.”
The journalist chose to call them immigration camps purposefully in this book, echoing the history of concentration camps he thinks is apropos.
Washington will be at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe on Aug. 27. The Show spoke to him about the book, beginning with his own immigration story that led him to this work.
Full conversation
JOHN WASHINGTON: My mother, she migrated, basically fled from Romania when she was a teenager and settled in Ohio. And I grew up in that Romanian American community, where being a migrant was one of the core pieces of a lot of people’s identity. And it was one of the main stories that they told about their history, and we’re really happy to have found a place to settle.
And that came into stark contrast, that reality, and that sort of feeling of welcome came into stark contrast when I started realizing and came of age politically, what the situation is like for so many other migrants and how things have changed — especially along the U.S.-Mexico border, but obviously now much beyond that — where people feel very much the opposite of welcome. They feel fear. Tom Homan, the border czar before the second Trump administration came back into office, said that all migrants should be looking over their shoulder.
LAUREN GILGER: I want to talk about immigration detention centers. In this book, you’re calling them camps, which I know is a purposeful decision that you address right off the bat. Tell us why.
JOHN WASHINGTON: Well, I think when you call them camps, you sort of have this idea of a really dark period in recent human history, which is during the Second World War and the proliferation of concentration camps. And people are both sort of, I think, drawn to and wary of thinking through that history when we see what’s happening today in the immigration detention landscape.
But when you get down to it, there is a definition of concentration camp, which is the confinement of civilians who have not necessarily committed a crime, and the long-term confinement of them. And that is exactly what we’re seeing today. And we have that one what I already mentioned, this one recent history of concentration camps used in the Third Reich, but we also have had concentration camps in the United States. I mean, what are often sort of euphemistically termed internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II.
And you go back further into the history and you look at the pattern of reservations for Native Americans and see how some of these things sort of blend together. And the very first concentration camps in the world in Cuba, South Africa and the Philippines were sort of used as models for the development later in the 20th century for concentration camps.
And what we have right now is just these facilities where people are held indefinitely — not because they’ve committed a crime, but because of either who they are or where they’re from. And the conditions inside are really, really God awful. People are dying, being tortured, subjected to solitary confinement, have zero or no access or very little access to medical care. Sometimes they don’t see the sun for weeks at a time.
What do we call these? I think whitewashing them using this bureaucratic language of “detention center” sort of masks over the reality that people suffer inside of them.
LAUREN GILGER: So, you mentioned how quickly growing this industry is, especially under the Trump administration, but it really is an industry that’s been growing over the last few decades. Put this into context for us in terms of what this looks like now and what it’s looked like in recent history here.
JOHN WASHINGTON: Right. So, the number of people who were detained before the turn of the last century was in the typically in the 10,000 range. And that really started ramping up after 9/11 and through successive administrations on both sides of the partisan divide.
We saw a number of really important key steps in the Clinton and Obama administrations to expand the footprint of immigration detention. And then it absolutely went into warp speed under the second Trump administration.
Last summer, with the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, there was $45 billion over four years dedicated specifically to expanding immigration detention. Right now, after this summer’s reconciliation bill, the Trump administration has through 2029 approximately $240 billion for immigration enforcement. That’s almost a quarter of a trillion dollars.
And a lot of that is being used to build out and buy more detention capacity. And those numbers are bearing out. The beginning of the Trump administration, there was 39,000-some people held. Right now, there’s a little bit over 65,000. And the goal of this administration is to hit 108,000 people detained at any given time in these detention camps.
LAUREN GILGER: Wow. OK. So, the main story here though you’re trying to tell in this book is sort of the antidote to that, right? Like how communities are actively fighting back against these and successfully often. Tell us about one of those communities. I know you talked to and visited many.
JOHN WASHINGTON: Yeah, so there is a very concerted pushback against immigration detention. Immigration detention is actually one of the lynchpins of this system. So, you can’t have people making arrests if there’s nowhere to put them. And so that is why so many communities have targeted immigration detention.
There is another reason, however, and that’s because people just kind of don’t want them in their backyard. And that is true for both Democratic and Republican, deep-red conservative, MAGA strongholds.
And we’ve seen this in places like Social Circle, Georgia. This is a community that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in the last election. And yet, as soon as it was announced that there was going to be one of these mega detention centers, possibly capacity of 10,000 people, they’re like, “Whoa, we don’t want this here.”
It was a form of NIMBYism that I think people have been harnessing on both sides of the political divide to say like, “OK, we can work with you if you don’t want a detention center, and we can try to shut this down.”
And there have been a lot of wins recently. Think of some of the warehouse models that we’ve seen, even in Arizona. Surprise is right now the development of that purchased warehouse for $70 million that caught the local community completely unawares. They stepped up and pushed back really hard, and right now, they’ve at least temporarily stopped it.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, happening right here in our backyard. I want to ask you about the approach you take in this book because it’s called “How to Close a Camp.” Like, this is quite literally and very explicitly like a guide almost for how people are doing this and how you think others should be doing it as well. I wonder how you view your role here as a journalist and as an advocate. Like, where do you think that line stands today?
JOHN WASHINGTON: Yeah, well, first of all, I think this is a classic example of what we call solutions journalism. I am reporting on a number of different communities who have done this work, who see real harms being committed, who see themselves, their communities and their neighbors targeted and want it to stop. And I explore that history, the current context and what they’re doing. That is just something that journalists have always done.
I think, of course, that a lot of people might question whether I have stake in the game. I’d push back on that. I don’t think this is a partisan issue. I think human rights are not something that fall on either the Republican or the Democratic side, or independent, or whatever.
I don’t think advocating for and calling out harms against a specifically targeted population because of who they are is actually advocacy. I think if anything, it’s just calling for basic human decency and the upholding of human rights standards.
LAUREN GILGER: OK, we’ll leave it there. John Washington is a journalist, author of the new book “How to Close a Camp,” as well as a staff writer for Lookout. John, thank you so much for coming back on The Show. Appreciate it very much.
JOHN WASHINGTON: Thanks, Lauren. Always glad to talk to you.
-
The Peoria Unified School District governing board is reevaluating its "No DEI" policy. Board President Jeff Tobey is proposing changes that he says will allow the district to protect equal treatment while continuing to teach “honest, age-appropriate history.” -
Lani Cupchoy wears many hats. She’s a public historian, an artist and a filmmaker as well as an assistant professor at Cal State University in Los Angeles. -
Water is a precious commodity in the desert — and especially so for Gary Paul Nabhan. -
Britt Warner is not just a writer and not just a poet. She’s an artist, musician, writer, pilates instructor and childhood equestrian whose writing is as varied as her interests. -
The West Valley NAACP says it’s filing a complaint with the Peoria Unified School District after it pulled three books from K-8 curriculum. This comes after three books written by people of color were removed from the K-8 curriculum.
