How to Close a Camp, and Keep It Closed

The Diamondback Correctional Facility sits at the edge of Watonga, Oklahoma: 2,160 beds, owned by CoreCivic since 1998. It sat idle since 2010, but not neglected. Last October, announcing a new contract for the facility—five years with the Oklahoma Department of Corrections and ICE, at roughly $100 million a year—CoreCivic's chief executive explained what the company had been doing with the fifteen empty years: making "investments to help ensure a seamless reactivation in the event of a new contract." After another $13 million for renovations requested by ICE, the first detainees arrived earlier this year. The reactivation was, as promised, pretty much seamless.

John Washington's How to Close a Camp rests on the premise its title announces: immigrant detention camps can be closed—organizers have closed them, and the book means to show you how. The premise is true, and it matters that someone has written it down as method rather than as hope.

Diamondback is the complication. By every measure a campaign could point to, that prison was closed: no contract, no detainees, no guards, for fifteen years. It was also, the whole time, held in readiness by an owner with a maintenance budget and no deadline.

A closed prison can be reopened as a camp, and any manual for the fight has to reckon with that.

Assembled to meet the moment

How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention (Haymarket, July, 224 pages) is Washington's third book on the border regime in six years, after The Dispossessed and The Case for Open Borders, and it is the one written most plainly for use. It is part history of immigrant detention and part practical guide, distilled from interviews with the organizers who have tried to shut facilities down or stall new ones. Such campaigns span from Los Angeles to Minneapolis to Leavenworth, Kansas.

It is a short book, assembled quickly to meet a moment that is still unfolding, and some readers will be tempted to hold the speed against it. That would be a mistake. No book can compete with the news media on timeliness, and this one is wise enough to not try. What it offers instead is the thing the news cannot: a method that outlasts the news cycle. The right measure is the one the title proposes. This book is a manual, and a manual is judged by whether a person who has never fought a detention center can pick it up and act.

The pages that will get photocopied and shared are at the back, in a set of appendixes that hold the book's deepest contribution. The first, "What it takes for a camp to exist," inventories a facility's dependency chain using the Adelanto ICE Processing Center as a case study. The appendix lists every permit, contract, site review, and utility hookup Adelanto needed before it could hold anyone, and the specific people who signed off on each step. Another appendix, "Public records and dissecting a camp," supplies sample FOIA language and walks through the questions a campaign should ask and try to answer first—from how many detainees a camp holds to who holds the contract to feed detainees to who sets the prices for items in the commissary.

What these pages offer is a cold start: a reader with no campaign, no experience, and a facility on their county's agenda can begin from them this week. Most movement books exhort; these pages equip.

The thin wins column

A reader will finish the tactical section of the book wanting more stories that end with a camp actually closed, and the wanting is no fault of Washington's. There are few such stories because the thing itself is brutally hard, and the era's biggest closure arrived too late for his deadline.

Two fights belong in the second edition this book should get.

One is Social Circle, Georgia, where a town of five thousand, facing down a ten-thousand-bed warehouse conversion, locked the facility's water meter over concerns about water and sewer capacity and then sued ICE; Senator Warnock has filed an amendment to defund the site. But the fight is ongoing, and no one should shelve it in the wins column yet.

The other is the Everglades camp known as "Alligator Alcatraz." In August 2025, Judge Kathleen Williams ordered the camp wound down on NEPA grounds, in litigation joined by the neighboring Miccosuke Tribe, and the headlines called it closed. In April 2026, an Eleventh Circuit panel reversed her 2–1 and the camp stayed open. In June 2026 it closed in fact, and on August 7 the state told Miami-Dade County its "mission" was complete and returned the Dade-Collier site to the county. Nearly 30,000 people were run through the camp in the time it was open. Its closure is a win, the biggest of this era. But it is an unfinished one.

"Closed" is an interval

A camp is not truly closed until the building is repurposed or destroyed and the land is held by someone who won't start a new camp. Otherwise, a building will refill, and temporary detainment structures can be put back up. Understanding this fact is what led me to create an index of former prisons being refilled by ICE: twelve active conversions of closed or idled prisons, holding about 10,200 people a day. Appleton sat empty for 16 years before ICE came, Diamondback for 15, and in 14 of the 17 buildings on the list, the private-prison operator owns the ground. An empty prison is a potential camp at rest.

This is the conclusion the book's tactical half needs and comes just short of stating: a campaign ends when the ground can no longer hold a camp, and every contract victory before that is an intermission.

In the case of Alligator Alcatraz, this means the fight goes on. The county holds the Dade-Collier site again, and Mayor Daniella Levine Cava has announced her intent to pursue sale and transfer of the lands to the National Park Service and Everglades restoration partners. But an intent is not a deed. The move, in an interval like this, is to keep the pressure campaign running past the closure, until the title actually moves. A land trust like The Conservation Fund exists for exactly this maneuver—buy the land, convey it to a public agency—and the geography writes the argument on its own, because the site is the old jetport whose defeat in 1970 created Big Cypress National Preserve, which literally surrounds the former camp. Finishing that transfer would be closing a camp in the only sense that cannot be reversed. It is also Washington's own thesis, one step past where the book stops.

What a second edition needs

The book's theory of leverage is local: the county commission, the contract, the permit, the utility hookup. It is a real theory, and worth pursuing as praxis, but the adversary it describes has already begun adapting to it. When states ban intergovernmental agreements or counties walk away, ICE has learned to route around the county entirely, with direct sole-source contracts to the operator. Washington touches on this workaround briefly while discussing Marana, Arizona. The mention deserves its own chapter, because the workaround is becoming a pattern. In Cibola County, New Mexico, the commission voted to wind down its ICE agreement in March—sixteen days after ICE had already moved to contract directly with CoreCivic, so the county's exit changed the paperwork and the population stayed. At North Lake in Michigan, the contract runs straight from ICE to the operator at more than $70 million a year, with no county in the loop. At Rivers in North Carolina, GEO announced a five-year direct contract in July. (Marana itself is on the index of refilled prisons: MTC bought the former state prison in 2025, and the sole-source notice contemplates up to 775 beds.)

The counter-tactics run in the other direction too, at the people who run the campaigns. The dependency-chain strategy the appendixes teach—contractors, utilities, permits—is known as "tertiary targeting." The government already has a playbook for criminalizing it. The nearest version is close to home for police and prison abolitionists: sixty-one Stop Cop City defendants indicted under Georgia's RICO statute, some of them for flyering and bail-fund work. Those charges were dismissed in December on prosecutorial-authority grounds, but the dismissal settled little: the state has appealed; when Cobb County prosecutors tried again with fresh indictments, a judge dismissed those too, on due-process grounds that leave re-indictment open. And there are still federal domestic terrorism charges pending.

This playbook has its own history: the most effective tertiary-targeting campaign ever mounted against a private company was Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), and the federal answer was the SHAC 7 prosecution under the Animal Enterprise Protection Act—prison time for running a website—followed by a broader statute to widen the net.

Washington's aim is to mobilize, and rightly; a manual that scared its readers off the field would defeat itself. But a manual that hands readers a pressure-campaign strategy without naming what happened to the last people who ran one hasn't finished the safety briefing. Hopefully a second edition will cover both of these counter-tactics.

Tell no lies, claim no easy victories

In the course of writing this review, my claim about Alligator Alcatraz changed three times. I first wrote that it was closed, on the strength of last year's headlines. Further research showed the closure had been reversed on appeal and the camp was open. Days later it closed in fact, and the state handed the site back to the county. Amílcar Cabral's line—tell no lies, claim no easy victories—is usually quoted against the state's propaganda, but it applies just as hard to our own side's messaging.

The stakes are explained in Washington's own conclusion. His section on "The Long Haul" warns that movements which hit their short- and medium-term goals quickly lose people—they declare the win and drift away. A premature victory claim has the same effect. The book names the disease, but the prescription is stops short of naming is message discipline: say exactly what is true and dated—camp closed, site returned, disposition pending—claim the win when the ground can no longer be a camp and no earlier, and don't let the media claim it for you.

The book knows information matters. A campaign's first job, it says, is to gather facts and map power, and the appendixes are built for exactly that. Organizers who follow the instruction will meet an information environment that is broken on purpose. The operators publish select, scant, and distorted information, because their audience is shareholders. The government publishes as little as it can until FOIA forces its hand.

What fills the vacuum is often thin or flatly wrong. In my own reporting, I've noticed that resources as basic as Wikipedia pages on the camps have this problem. Updating them with sourced, current information is a concrete action within any reader's reach—unglamorous, high-leverage, and exactly the task the appendixes generate raw material for, since every FOIA production is a citation waiting to be used.

The press layer needs the pressure too, and ordinary errors matter as much as the malicious ones. When the press frames an expansion fight as ongoing even though the contracts are already signed, as happened in Cibola, they send organizers to a fight that has already moved on. When the press repeats things like job-creation numbers without investigating their veracity, they hand the commission an economic case that hasn't been audited and may not be based in reality. A campaign that gets the local paper to correct the record changes the terrain the county commission votes on, for the better.

"Mudding up the works" and what it buys

Is the book's theory of power adequate, or is it proceduralism in movement dress? The cases give a real answer. The city of Leavenworth won its permit injunction twice, and then granted the permit, and detainees arrived within days. Delay is not closure. But delay—what one activist in the book calls "mudding up the works"—is the interval in which a building and its land can be taken off the board. Washington has written a good manual for winning intervals. Alligator Alcatraz is the test running in real time. The interval is open, the county holds the deed, and whether the movement can finish—title moved to conservation, ground no longer available—will say more about the book's thesis than any review can.

How to Close a Camp is out now from Haymarket. Buy it, read the appendixes twice, and share it with the people in your community who need it. The index of former prisons being refilled by ICE is the running companion to this review—if you know a building that belongs on it, let me know. And if Hotel Florida is useful to you, subscribe below so the next dispatch finds you.