How to Close a Camp

​The American immigration system is fundamentally cruel. Our economic system (with its tentacles across the world) pulls people into our country, then criminalizes them as they attempt to build lives here.

​Thousands and thousands of people have been thrown into a prison system we euphemism as "immigrant detention." In How to Close a Camp, journalist and translator John Washington offers a galvanizing, clear-eyed case for why we must close these camps—and how to do it.

In spite of the decades-long growth of immigrant detention, communities have been fighting back against camps—and winning. Washington distills strategies and lessons from successful campaigns to close camps and block or slow the opening of new ones, drawing on conversations with veteran organizers from the movement.

​Washington will be joined in conversation by Lauren Markham and Julia Neusner.

​Lauren Markham is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life (Crown), A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (Riverhead) and Immemorial (Transit).

​Julia Neusner is a lawyer and researcher focusing on migration and human rights. She is the founder of the nonprofit Human Security Initiative and has worked as an attorney with the International Refugee Assistance Project, the Stanford Migration and Asylum Lab, and Human Rights First. Her work includes extensive field research at the U.S.-Mexico border examining the impact of U.S. policies and the intersection of climate change with human mobility.