A new book by “Lookout” Senior Staff Writer John Washington reports on Trump’s atrocious and sprawling network of detention camps inside the United States. Washington has written about border issues, climate change, and democratic institutions for “The Guardian,” “The New York Review of Books,” “The Nation,” and “The Intercept.”
He sat down with us to unpack his new book “How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigration Detention.” Article continues below.
Watch our conversation
No Proof of Life, No Communication
Under the Convention Against Torture, the United States granted Pietro Graza asylum protection due to the fact that he was nearly murdered in his native Brazil because of his sexuality.
However, according to Washington, while the Trump administration followed the judge’s order not to deport Graza back to Brazil, they deported him to Liberia. And this is a major component of Trump’s detention regime: not just camps inside America, but also establishing camps outside of it.
“[Graza] and a couple others, a couple of Cuban men, they resisted when they realized where they were going,” said Washington. “They were shackled for 36 hours on the airplane.”
When the plane landed in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, they refused to get off the aircraft. Washington described how they had to be dragged off of it. When the Liberian government observed what was happening, they refused to accept Graza and four others. So the Trump administration flew these men to Equatorial Guinea.
That Western African nation has kept all five men in a decommissioned hotel for roughly a month.
Washington connected with Graza through a contraband phone and Graza showed him the conditions in the hotel and how Graza wasn’t allowed to leave.
Washington recounted, “He and another gay man from Egypt eventually got into trouble because the authorities found out that they were using their phones to talk to reporters. The military threatened to shoot them.”
Graza managed to send Washington video of officers pointing a rifle at the Egyptian. The situation deteriorated from there.
“The authorities went into their hotel rooms, took away all their phones, and the Egyptian man, they put a bag over his head, beat him, and he is now being held we don’t know where,” said Washington. “We don’t even have proof of life. And Pietro […] as far as we know, is still in the hotel. But he has no means of communication to his lawyer, to his family, to me, or to any other reporters.”
Washington explained that Equatorial Guinea is a violent place for detained LGBTQ people. In the country’s prisons they face, “rape, torture, or death.”
So far, the U.S. has paid $5 million for these types of deportations to Equatorial Guinea. Trump has established similar agreements with roughly 35 nations and in the past 18 months deported approximately 26,000 people to these countries. The majority of the time, these individuals have no connection whatsoever to these states.
The most egregious instance was when Trump sent two hundred men to El Salvador’s CECOT Terrorism Confinement Center which is widely regarded as a concentration camp run by that country’s dictator. It was only after sustained protests in the US and abroad that Trump had those men transferred out of CECOT and El Salvador.
Billions of dollars spent to fund deportations
Washington said that the Department of Homeland Security is working with approximately a quarter of a trillion dollars to detain and deport undocumented people. This included the $70 billion dollars from last year’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” (H.R. 1). To fund this, Trump made cuts to social services like Medicaid and SNAP benefits.
“They threw money, personnel, and really tried to just widen the net as much as possible,” Washington said. “People of course knew that this was coming. I think people weren’t quite prepared for how intense the crackdown was going to be.”
The result, said Washington, is that this summer ICE made the largest amount of arrests in history. In his book, “How to Close a Camp,” Washington points out that the funding and coordination for arrests and deportation is what sets Trump apart in the country’s immigration history.
“I think that the real innovation of the second Trump administration is not so much the cruelty of immigration enforcement, but the efficiency that they’re able to conduct their enforcement operations with, because the cruelty has long been baked in our system.
This includes the Spanish empire’s colonial policy of “reduction.” In his book Washington charts how the Spanish violently prevented Indigenous nations from living in their traditional homes that changed seasonally. The Spanish confined native peoples to specific territory. The United States continued that violence with its own modern camp system emerging in the late 1800s, according to Washington. This included the Supreme Court issuing a slew of opinions that empowered the United States, among other things, to detain people indefinitely.
Trump decimated oversight
In 2025, Trump eliminated the two internal watchdogs setup to investigate DHS if it violates the law. One was the Office of Immigration Detention Oversight (OIDO), which had approximately 350 staff members.
“He canceled OIDO, got rid of it; then he had to reinstate it because of a court challenge, [but] now there’s 30 some [staff],” Washington said. “It’s a 10th of the overall personnel that are working there. And what they’re able to do is not very much.”
While Trump successfully weakened federal governmental accountability, he was caught flat footed at the local level.
It’s there that Washington advises readers to pay attention to the many levers of power available to them.
One example he cites is the “detention re-engineering initiative” Trump announced in late 2025. However, numerous local jurisdictions have blocked them — even in MAGA strongholds.
Social Circle, Georgia voted overwhelmingly for Trump two years ago, but residents rejected a Trump detention center because of insufficient water and sewage capabilities. In Surprise, Arizona, over 1,000 residents surprised Trump when they convened on a city meeting demanding the city reject a proposed detention center that Trump wanted to create inside a warehouse within a mile of a school.
Washington said that across the street from the warehouse, “there’s a cheer academy […] where kids as young as three-years-old learn to be cheerleaders.”
“The local politicians are like, ‘Look, there’s actually nothing we can do because DHS bought this from a private Company and they can do what they want with it,” explained Washington. “[But] there is a lot that they could do and there’s examples of this that I put out in my book. They can start with something like a resolution saying they don’t want it, which may drive up some sort of political costs. They can threaten to withhold utilities, wastewater, lighting, water. They can restrict permitting or zoning, environmental reviews that these local jurisdictions are involved in. All of this happens at the local level.”
Due to actions like these, ICE has had to pause or cancel plans to create detention centers out of warehouses they’ve already purchased.
But, Washington warned, the moment to act is now. “It is so much easier to stop a detention camp from coming in than to shut one down that’s already operating. This is the moment when people really need to step up.”
He noted that in Vermont and New Hampshire queer-led groups have stepped up to interrupt ICE activity at regional airports. This has forced the agency to have to bus detainees all the way to Boston which has led to significant increases in costs and logistics.
Can it be reformed?
“It’s not [reformable],” Washington said. “The proof of that is that people have been trying to reform it since it was first established and they’ve been trying to reign in its excesses and they have been unable to do so.”
He pointed to efforts by both the Biden and Obama administrations to pass immigration reform that resulted in strengthening, not reigning in, DHS and ICE.
“The real threat is not imagining a world without ICE. The real threat is the present reality of ICE reigning terror onto our communities,” Washington said. “That is something that we can stop right now.”
To connect with Washington you can visit his Substack at johnwashington.substack.com. Buy your copy of “How to Close a Camp: Dispatches Against the Fight Against Immigration Detention.“
