A camp is close to where you live, work, organize. Camps are nearly everywhere, with hundreds of “detention centers,” “processing centers,” “holding facilities,” as well as leased local jail and prison cells in every state of America and in many countries throughout the world. We are building more of them and locking away more people. A camp warps and degrades reality both for those in fear of ending up in one and for those living alongside them. Our decisions as a society, meanwhile, are uprooting more and more people from their homes, pushing people to flee, and failing to meet them with the protection, basic rights, freedom, or dignity they seek. The question we must ask about closing the camp is not if or why or when, but only how.

To be able to close a camp, we must understand what a camp is. We must look at campaigns to close or block camps since the first of them—the reservations, the ships, the “Chinese jails” and Ellis and Angel Islands—opened and understand what those fights accomplished and how. More than a century of resistance, refusal, and grassroots activism has taught us that we need to pry into the legal, practical, and political mechanisms of how camps are built and function.

The proliferation of the camp is very likely to accelerate. We have seen the camp expanded and redeployed in the past to target not just migrants but also racialized groups and so-called political subversives. During the internment period in the 1940s, the US built and operated ten large concentration camps. As historian Brianna Nol explains, once the infrastructure is built out, it is utilized, and targeted populations can shift and expand. “When the INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] moved noncitizens to internment camps, it placed them on the same deportation trains, supervised by the same deportation officers who had expelled thousands of migrants from the United States in the prior two decades,” Nol writes. The mechanism of the camp can be universally deployed. As a tool, it can manacle any neck— native or newcomer.

Stakes are high. The status quo is frightening, and the near future is likely significantly worse. But pessimism, as the saying goes, is a luxury we can’t afford. “I know that what I am asking is impossible,” James Baldwin wrote in 1963. “But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand.” The demand is to close the camp.

What is a camp? What are these tools of containment and torture, these embodiments of fear and banners of nationalist violence? A camp—prisons or jails built or operated to lock up migrants—is society seeing certain groups of people as unwanted and disposable. A camp is a distraction from entrenched political failure—scapegoating “the other” for societal deterioration, underfunded public education and declining literacy, expensive and inconsistently available healthcare, and ethical anomie. A camp is a refusal to take responsibility for or reckon with the cataclysm of climate change, war, economic terrorism, and the normalization of pervasive neglect, disregard of the rule of law, and chasmic and ever-widening inequalities. A camp is a society turning its back on a basic sense of morality.

An immigration detention camp is not the same as a prisoner of war camp, a refugee or displaced person camp, a forced labor camp, a concentration camp, or an extermination camp. Within each of these categories, levels of confinement, savagery, lawlessness, and dehumanization vary. Yet they are of the same genus, and it is revealing to articulate the similarities between them, and what distinguishes a camp from a prison, or camp life from noncamp life (even when that includes ghettoes, slums, favelas, or other structural conditions of precarization and expropriation that can generate camplike conditions).

While it’s important not to elide historical variance, the word camp maintains shades of its superlative forms—concentration or extermination camps—and those shades are germane, and why I believe camp is most apt for immigration detention. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls the variations of camp a “progression,” suggesting it isn’t so hard to cross the line from a camp that confines people to one that hastens social or legal death—and ultimately to one that exterminates.

All camps strip people of, or at least diminish, their legal personhood. And while people held in immigration camps are not completely outside the sphere of law, they are mocked by the law. Given immigration courts’ clear kangaroo characteristics—including mass trials and the fact that both judge and prosecutor work for the same boss, the executive branch—it is a stretch to say that immigrants are afforded any semblance of justice. As Dan Stone, author of A Very Short Introduction to Concentration Camps, writes of people held in immigration camps, “They are very close to falling into [philosopher Hannah] Arendt’s category of the superfluous stateless person from whom the ‘right to have rights’ has been removed.”

The immigration camp, as I define it, is the carceral confinement and control of people deemed unwanted or “out of place.” A society might designate an individual or community as unwanted to maintain a racial order, exploit surplus labor, neutralize a perceived political threat, or try to distract from societal ills. They do so by targeting, marginalizing, and scapegoating those individuals or communities. And while that targeting is typically focused on migrants—as we’re using the term here—it’s important to avoid overreliance on or simplification of that designation: Nonmigrants, including citizens, are also interrogated by immigration agents and sometimes arrested and held in camps to be deported.

While immigration camps also share similarities with prisons and jails, they are categorically different. People held in camps are being confined (in effect, punished) not for something they allegedly did but because of who or where they are. This constitutes an even more penetrating attack on their personhood. Deep within its very definition, a camp carries a dangerous, manufactured distinction between people. The existence of the camp is an a priori conception that some people belong and others do not, that some people have rightful claims to territory or rights and others do not.

In other words, and importantly, the idea of the camp extends beyond its physical structure. People don’t have to be confined within the walls of the camp to be consigned to the camp’s violence, logic, and reach.

While the word “camp” in this context most obviously calls to mind the concentration camps that killed millions in the Holocaust, we can look to US history for two blueprints for the modern immigration camp: the Indian reservations and the Japanese American internment camps. Historian Kathleen DuVal, in Native Nations, writes that the 1830 Indian Removal Act resulted in “one of the country’s most extreme violations of sovereignty and human rights, [when] it ultimately expelled tens of thousands of people from their homes and crowded them into Indian Territory.” While the move was based in 19th-century law, its motivations had roots in the nation’s founding. Thomas Jefferson, for example, insisted in 1780 that the Shawnee people move west or be wiped out because “the same world will scarcely do for them and us.”

Jefferson’s quip captures a fundamental logic of the camp: an unwillingness to share space. Both the reservation system and, later, Indian boarding schools were designed to restrict mobility, to detain (or encamp), and obliterate difference through violence—setting a precedent still followed today in cultural, political, legal, and physical attacks against immigrants. “You are not allowed to be here” is only a few steps away—and sometimes no steps away—from “You are not allowed to be.” That is the continuum we reject when we reject the camp.

Even before the United States was founded, Spanish colonizers in the Southwest in the 1600s implemented the strategy of reducción to try to corral and immobilize Native populations. As Duval explains, the Spanish “aimed to ‘reduce’ Native people from what they saw as their barbarous nomadic way of life into the concentrated and permanent towns like those of Spain.” The reducción (and later the reservation system), the border wall, and immigration detention are variations on a single architecture.

Modern US immigration camps can take many forms. They can be privately run detention centers, federally owned service-processing centers, “short term” Border Patrol holding facilities, massive clusters of tents on military bases, or cells in local jails. They are occasionally hotel rooms. Camps also include so-called alternatives to detention: Nearly 400,000 migrants in the US, at a peak in 2022, were shackled with electronic monitoring devices or under other forms of “supervision” and surveillance.

We also need to look beyond borders to the international outsourcing of camps. By 2025, the United States relied on a global constellation of camps to lock up migrants, including at its naval base at Guantánamo, a shipping container on a military base in Djibouti, a gulag in El Salvador, a “migrant care” center in Costa Rica, and a hotel in Panama. In the summer of 2025, the Trump administration rendered eight men to South Sudan and five men to the small African nation of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. None of the five sent to Eswatini had ever been there before, and they weren’t told where they were being sent, by military transport plane, until minutes before they touched down. They were later incarcerated in a maximum-security prison.

“Mass incarceration is mass elimination,” writes historian Kelly Lytle Hernández in City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965. “Incarceration operates as a means of purging, removing, caging, containing, erasing, disappearing, and eliminating targeted populations from land, life, and society in the United States.” That is the logic of the camp: fear, hate, punishment, torture, banishment, death.

Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called the 20th century “the century of camps.” Only a quarter of the way through the 21st century, let these hundred years not be a repeat, or worse.

The first and crucial step to closing a camp is being against the camp.

Not a camp, not that camp, not a newly proposed camp or this particularly atrocious camp. But against camp as concept, against camp as practice—against all camps. Against locking people up because of where they were born or where they are.

More practically—and also key to closing a camp—is the understanding that immigration detention camps are not abstract federal machines. They are, rather, deeply embedded in local political economies: counties that sign contracts with ICE, private prison companies that seek zoning permits and tax breaks, local health departments that license medical providers, and municipal governments that issue permits for food services and utility hookups. Every one of these nodes is a potential pressure point.

Camps can’t be built and can’t be run without the land sales, the staffing, or the licensing, permitting, and accreditation that legitimize them. They can’t be built without enough people saying OK, turning their heads, remaining insulated from the horrors of the camp. Camps depend on the political will to build and maintain them. At the same time, they are susceptible to the will to shutter and repurpose them. A camp is a long series of choices that need frequent reaffirmation.

We can make different choices.

The campaigns that have forced ICE out of jail wings and shuttered entire facilities offer a potential playbook for the first steps: Document abuses closely with people inside; build durable relationships across bars and across faith and community groups; focus on contracts, licensing, and permitting vulnerabilities; and convert local moral outrage into national pressure. At the Etowah County Detention Center in Alabama, organizers from Adelante and Detention Watch Network spent 14 years recording medical neglect, prolonged solitary confinement, and pandemic-era mistreatment while maintaining steady lines of communication with those detained.

That patient, yearslong, relationship-driven organizing—regular visits, call-in campaigns, public vigils, and coordinated protests with national partners—helped make Etowah a liability for officials and ultimately led ICE, in 2022, to terminate its contract.

The impacts of shutting down a camp reverberate beyond the physical structure. The yearslong effort to shutter the West County Detention Facility in California, for example, was successful, but the impact was mixed. While the camp itself was closed, people held in the facility were mostly transferred, not released. And yet, there were other effects, including a reduction in local immigration enforcement activity. A 2018 report, “Lessons from the ICE Detention Contract Termination in Contra Costa County, CA, ”cites evidence “that fewer people from Northern California are now being detained. ICE itself has admitted as much, pointing to reductions in bed space as a ‘challenge’ to their operations.” The finding “suggests closing detention facilities doesn’t just redirect immigration detention; it actually bites away at it. Less bed space makes it harder to house, detain, and deport people.”

A separate study backs that claim: An immigrant is more than twice as likely to be arrested in a county with capacity to detain more than 50 people in ICE custody than in a county that has less or no camp capacity. When a county has 850 or more detention beds, the likelihood of an immigrant being arrested is about six and a half times higher than if the county has none. Not only is the camp a danger to those inside of it; crucially, it is a constant threat to those outside of it as well. If you don’t want ICE prowling your neighborhood, it will help to close your neighborhood camp. If you don’t want ICE prowling at all, close all the camps.

The epilogue to Etowah’s closure, however, is a story of backslide. In 2025, barely three years after the last detainees were transferred, local sheriffs and federal officials conspired to reopen the jail’s cells to immigrant incarceration—a reminder that shutdown victories, absent structural guarantees or systemic change or repurposing, are fragile and reversible.

For the campaigners who understand their struggle in longer historical rhythms—from Reconstruction-era racial policing to the present convergence of immigration enforcement and mass incarceration—the lesson is unmistakable: To close a camp is not only to terminate a contract but to ensure the permanence of its obsolescence, whether through demolition, political covenant, or transformation into something wholly incapable of caging human beings.

Or better: rebuilding a society that doesn’t rely on camps. Only then can the dismantling of the carceral state become irreversible.