Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted with permission from How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention, out from Haymarket Books this July.
The Prison-Immigration Knot
By the late 1980s, thanks to over a decade of laws criminalizing immigrants and expanding the camp system, prison and immigration detention industries were operating by their own economic logics. Even in the face of recessions, the prison industry kept growing. Immigration detention was seen by the Reagan administration as “recession-proof.” For private corporations like CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), founded in 1983, immigration detention was a financial lifeline. Federal contracts insulated companies from state budget crises and guaranteed steady revenue streams.
Detention was sold as both a law-and-order necessity and an economic opportunity, welding together the racist politics of the drug war with the rise of private prisons. Communities hollowed out by deindustrialization welcomed detention centers as employers of last resort. Local politicians who couldn’t secure new factories or union jobs instead competed for prisons and INS contracts. Officials in Port Isabel, Texas, for instance, saw the expansion of what was known as El Corralón, or “the big corral,” as a way to cash in on Reagan’s willingness to lock up asylum seekers.
But if Reagan set the foundation, the Clinton administration built the superstructure. Clinton rode into office pledging to be tough not only on crime but also on immigrants. Governor of Arkansas at the time of the Mariel boatlift, he was furious at the Jimmy Carter administration for detaining migrants at an Arkansas camp. The political backlash had been costly for him, and his resentment carried into his presidency. Clinton’s 1994 crime bill funneled billions into prison construction and policing, while his 1996 immigration laws fundamentally reshaped the landscape of enforcement. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (both of 1996) expanded the categories of deportable offenses, introduced mandatory detention for a wide range of crimes (including minor and decades-old convictions), and sharply curtailed judicial discretion. The antiterrorism law, ostensibly in response to the most home-grown of terror acts (especially the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by white nationalist Timothy McVeigh), in fact focused on purported threats coming from abroad. The law changed the detention of many migrants from discretionary to mandatory, allowing migrants to be detained for up to two years before seeing an immigration judge.
How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention
The 1996 laws, the “aggravated felony” category introduced in 1988, and the expansion of INS camps like Krome in Miami and Port Isabel in Texas marked the complete insertion of immigration detention into the American carceral state. Now, the same logic that incarcerated millions of Black Americans under mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws also ensnared migrants—justified by the same political rhetoric of danger, disorder, and deterrence. Both carceral outgrowths served the same economic interests of private prison companies and, purportedly, struggling rural economies. And both entrenched a culture of disposability, where human beings were warehoused in the name of public safety. The expansion of the immigration camp system was rapid and dramatic. In 1994, there were fewer than 7,000 immigrants in detention on any given day. By 2001, the INS was detaining an average of 19,500 noncitizens daily, with nearly 190,000 detained over the course of that fiscal year. And while the expansion was sold to localities as an economic windfall, the promise was empty. Researchers Amy Glasmeier and Tracey Farrigan compared fifty-five rural counties with prisons constructed between 1985 and 1995 to similar counties without prisons. They found “little evidence of prisons fostering economic growth especially in persistently poor communities.” As the “century of the camp” began to sunset, the prison industrial complex had become a catchall political solution.
The course was set in the 1990s, but, as they did for so much else, the September 11, 2001, attacks marked another key inflection point for immigration camps. In one of the first immigration enforcement moves after the towers fell, INS Acting Deputy Commissioner Peter Michael Becraft implemented a new parole policy targeting Haitian asylum seekers: No Haitian could be paroled out of detention without direct approval from INS headquarters in Washington, even if they had proven their eligibility for asylum. As migrant justice organizer Silky Shah tells me, “Anti-Black racism is the underlying component of the rise of these anti-immi-grant systems.” 9/11 also prompted the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and its subagency ICE.
Many such senseless, vindictive, and downright racist policies would follow, such as the PATRIOT Act, allowing for indefinite detention, or the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which mandated ICE increase detention capacity by eight thousand per year from 2006 to 2010.
From the inception of his administration in 2000, George W. Bush oversaw a massive expansion of border militarization, including hundreds of miles of border barriers and doubling the number of Border Patrol agents. The vilification, scapegoating, surveillance, and arrests of Muslims, in particular, presaged the open revilement cast on Haitians and other darker-skinned migrants during the Trump administration. At the same time, looking at either the Clinton presidency before Bush or Obama’s presidency after highlights the bipartisan reliance on criminalization of migrants and on the camp. In 2009, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia introduced a clause in the DHS Appropriations Bill that the department “shall maintain a level of not less than 33,400 detention beds.” In 2012, that “bed quota,” as it became known, was raised to 34,000. The federal government pays out contracts for those beds—via the so-called “guaranteed minimum” clauses—whether they’re filled or not.
On the state level, Arizona, followed by both Georgia and Alabama, led the way in 2010 by trying to make unauthorized migration not only a federal crime but also a state violation. The hypocrisy of crackdown culture continued: All three states passed harsh anti-immigrant laws at the same time they courted ICE contracts to open new detention centers, meaning local jurisdictions increasingly depended on detaining the very people they wanted out.
The experience of detention in Georgia’s Irwin County highlights the local effects of that dependency. What had been a US Marshals facility in the rural county in the early 1990s had shut down. In 2004, a private company reopened the facility to serve as an overflow lockup, detaining people from other counties. With the economy in Irwin struggling—a drought and a lack of migrant agricultural workers were making things worse—in 2007, the county passed a $55 million bond package to expand the prison. They were hoping to attract federal agencies in the detention business and turn the prison into the county’s lifeline. It didn’t quite work. There simply wasn’t enough revenue, and by 2011, after another change in ownership, the facility was nearly a million dollars behind on its taxes. As reported in The Nation, Hazel McCranie, president of the Ocilla-Irwin Chamber of Commerce, told local officials: “You’ve got to go out and get a contract with ICE. That’s your salvation.”
To entice ICE, the joint owners of the prison, with the support of members of Congress and former Senator Johnny Isakson, offered a deal: Instead of spending the typical $60, $90, or sometimes over $160 per day to lock a person up, ICE could cage someone in the Irwin camp for only forty-five dollars a day. ICE soon began transferring people from Alabama’s Etowah jail (where, as we saw in the introduction, Juan was locked up for almost five years) to Irwin.
In January 2011, four people locked inside the Irwin camp went on hunger strike and were sent to solitary confinement as punishment. One detained person held in the Irwin camp, Florent Firmin Kalonji Kalala, told reporters, “We’re fed like dogs.” He added: “I just feel humiliated—that’s the feeling I have every day.”
Years later, the county’s moral and financial compromise deepened. In 2020, reporter José Olivares and I broke a story about Irwin that made international headlines: Besides dangerously lax protocols amid the COVID-19 pandemic, an ICE-contracted doctor who treated patients at Irwin was multiply accused of performing invasive, nonconsensual, and unnecessary gynecological surgeries. We spoke with one woman, Yuridia, who was held in the camp and went to see the doctor after suffering lower abdominal cramps. Without proper explanation, she was soon on the operating table. It wasn’t until she was deported to Mexico that, still suffering the after-effects of the surgery, she learned she had had her uterus removed.
Once exposed, the conditions prompted international outcry, lawsuits, and a Senate investigation, while giving more fuel to people inside and out fighting to shut down the camp. In 2021, ICE announced it was closing the Irwin camp. Then, just as we’ve seen time and again with other camps that aren’t demolished or turned into something new, in 2025 the Trump administration announced its reopening. Steady source of tax revenue, reliable employer, wholesome community partner the camp is not.
Much of the camp infrastructure we see today was established in the Obama years. In 2014, as more families, mostly from Central America, fled violence and poverty and headed toward the United States, the Obama administration—following the encrusted playbook first written in the nineteenth century to try to dispel the Chinese—reverted to using detention as an attempted means of deterrence. First they reoutfitted a law enforcement training site in Artesia, New Mexico; then, they opened the 2,400-bed South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, to lock up mothers and their children. In 2015 I spent a week in and out of the camp in Dilley—then one of the largest detention camps in the country—frequently referred to as a “baby jail.”
Though school-age kids attended classes inside Dilley and had ready access to milk and apples—adding a thin veneer of humanism to the camp—the atmosphere was starkly punitive. Many of the children I met had colds or coughs. Medical attention was slow and, according to women I interviewed, sick kids were regularly told by medical staff simply to drink water. This was the same tap water that a cook at a local drive-thru taco shop told me not to drink “cuz of the oil”—a reference to the fact that residents in and around Dilley were concerned about fracking wastewater contaminating their groundwater. Many of the kids had trouble sleeping, and women I spoke with reported that their children were depressed and not eating. One told me that her 11-year-old boy had lost more than ten pounds since coming to Dilley. “We are creating a mental health crisis,” one attorney representing the moms and kids, and working to shut the place down, said. “These kids are going to have PTSD and need serious therapy.”
The same year, in 2014, the Obama administration also opened an ICE staging facility in Alexandria, Louisiana:a camp with an airport, allowing for more efficient deportations. As Nora Ahmed, the director of ACLU Louisiana, explained to me, the facility was “really what allowed Obama to become the deporter-in-chief.” (In the Trump era, the cruel efficiency of the Obama administration’s camp-airport infrastructure has proven incredibly useful.)
Protests, hunger strikes, shutdown campaigns—all of it pushed the Obama administration to issue cosmetic changes and scale back some of the most dehumanizing excesses of the camp system. While Dilley was finally shuttered in 2024, the following year the Trump administration announced it was reopening it. A few months later, a legal complaint detailed how young children held in the Dilley family camp, sometimes for months, did not have reliable access to clean drinking water, soap, or shampoo. The echoes of 2015— nearly identical human rights complaints coming out of the same camp—were clamorous. Parents and their young children reported sleep deprivation due to lights being on 24/7 and a lack of emergency medical attention for kids in acute medical distress. One 11-year-old girl wrote to her attorneys, “Sometimes I see kids who are sad. Most of the kids don’t play because they are afraid.” One nine-year-old boy regressed so severely he could no longer control his bowel movements and had to start using diapers.
Kids who don’t play, diapers on nine-year-olds—this is Clinton, Obama, and Biden’s immigration policy legacy: building out the camp infrastructure to humiliate, starve, abuse, and lay the groundwork for their virulently anti-immigrant successors.
And yet there are ways—long established and newly dusted off, storied and hardly recognized—to push back.
It can start with simply questioning the legitimacy of the camps.
A fascinating 1993 Department of Justice report, Resolution of Prison Riots, mentioned Cuban migrants protesting their detention and included a section called “Breakdown of Legitimacy of Imprisoning Criteria,” which notes: “We observe that most inmates most of the time accept as legitimate the imprisonment of their fellow inmates. They may protest their own conviction or sentence but, at the same time, believe that the other inmates are guilty of crimes, deserve prison sentences, and ought not to be discharged en masse. In uncommon periods in history, however, these beliefs may be challenged. Once it is held that the criteria for imprisonment are arbitrary, it is a short step to the belief that rebellion is justified.”
In other words, if we recognize the arbitrariness of imprisoning people because of where they are from or where they have moved, we begin to see through the illusion of the camp. We are in such an “uncommon” period now. We can see through the illusion, and we can take that short step toward rebellion against the camp.
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