John Washington
The History of The Camp
The first camps were ships. Cramped, airless brigs creaking belowdecks as the tides and weather bobbed and yawed up their hulls. The food was meager and bad, sometimes turned. US government officials, bound or at least compelled by the Constitution, were responsible for protecting people within their jurisdiction—which meant that as soon as foreign passengers disembarked from a ship, they could avail themselves of the laws of the land. Yet if officials could keep those passengers off that land, so the logic went, they could avoid the lengthy or costly work of determining their immigration status.
And so, in the 1880s, US officials forced transoceanic ships to keep people on board—in those cramped and damp brigs—until they could be vetted. But that move was odious to the ships’ captains, who could be forced to wait in the harbor for days or even weeks, feeding, maintaining, and dealing with the grief of their charges. It cut into company profits by delaying their next voyage. The passengers, unwanted from both sides, were crushed between the twin rocks of commerce and nationalism.
That tension, along with aggressive lobbying from shipping companies, pushed Congress to pass a law in 1891 defining a bizarre concept known as the “entry fiction,” in which passengers could physically disembark from ships arriving to the United States, but wouldn’t be considered officially inside of the country: Their entry, according to the state, was a fiction. They were on land but hadn’t legally landed. Migrants consigned to this liminal space were held in buildings run by shipping companies, where the government could then process them and either let them in or try to send them back.
“A cheap, two-story wooden building, at the end of a wharf, built out over the water where the odors of sewage and bilge are most offensive”: so describes one contemporary observe of a nineteenth-century dockside camp, quoted by scholar César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández in his book Migrating to Prison: America's Obsession with Locking up Migrants. “Unclean, at times overrun with vermin, and often inadequate to the numbers to be detained. The food provided was poor and the condition even more unsanitary than the police cells of the city.” An inspector called one such holding cell a “death trap.”
Thus was born an early iteration of the camp, what García Hernández calls “an in-between space in law…neither outside nor inside the United States.” The Kafkaesque duality still presides in the camps today: Immigration detention centers are not—by strict legal definition—punitive, and yet they are punishing. They are officially temporary, but can be indefinite. They are administrative dungeons, exceptional and yet quotidian. The duality extends further still, to the two-faced nature of immigration politicking: Anti-immigration factions (across the partisan divide) swear they don’t want immigrants, or don’t want too many immigrants, but our country depends on them to provide medical care, conduct scientific research, build homes, lay roads, open businesses, innovate, make art, and grow and cook food. Meanwhile, whole industries, namely the border and immigration enforcement industrial complex, have developed because of them. Starker still, is the paradox of politicians who vilify, scapegoat, cast all color of blame and hate on migrants and yet depend on them—at times for their very political raison d'être—for clickbait and campaign fodder. All of those contradictions, all those monstrosities, are embodied in the camp.
The above is an excerpt from How to Close a Camp: Dispatches from the Fight Against Immigrant Detention, Washington’s most recent book, published by Haymarket Books in 2026.
John Washington is an investigative journalist who, in addition to How to Close a Camp, has written extensively about migration including The Case for Open Borders (2024) and The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum and the US-Mexican Border and Beyond (2020). He is also an award-winning translator, having translated works by Óscar Martínez, Anabel Hernández, and Sandra Rodríguez Nieto, among others. He is currently a staff writer at LOOKOUT, an accountability news outlet focusing on LGBTQ+ issues. You can follow his work on Substack.