Rachel Maddow is helping STOP Trump's prison camps. To do it, she broke one rule.

The MSNOW anchor partly inspired a new effort — GTFOice.org — that's now going mainstream around the country.

Last night, Rachel Maddow devoted the majority of her show to the growing national movement to block Trump’s prison camps from taking root in American communities. She also did something she almost never does.

She put two guests on at once.

If you don’t watch her show religiously, that probably sounds like nothing. But the format on Maddow’s broadcast is one-on-one, and it has been for years. She’s said so on air herself. The rare exceptions are a person and their lawyer. Otherwise, it’s her and one other human being, usually in long form, working through a single thread until it’s understood. Which is cool. I like that.

So when she opened her segment last night by telling viewers, “I’m about to break one of the informal rules that we have on this show,” I knew folks would be intrigued. Hell, I was intrigued. And I was sitting there in the chair waiting to come onto the show!

It turns out Rachel wanted to know why a conservative ex-Trump official and a progressive data scientist would be teaming up. So she brought us on at the same time. Rachel welcomed me and Project Salt Box co-founder Michael Wriston to talk about the new effort we launched: GTFOice.org — “Get the Facilities Out, ICE!” — a new nationwide rapid-response network to block Trump’s prison camps. This is a team effort — Michael’s org, DEFIANCE.org, and The Save America Movement (SAM).

Michael and I told her why we decided to collaborate. This topic far transcends partisan lines. No American — regardless of ideological stripes — should be “okay” with DHS developing enough detention capacity to imprison the entirety of Salt Lake City or Knoxville. I’ve spent almost two decades helping to build DHS. So believe me when I say that kind of sprawling prison system is vastly more capacity than DHS needs for immigration, and it has ominous overtones of a police state.

Little did Rachel Maddow know, SHE helped inspire this effort.

After we saw her coverage about Project Salt Box, we reached out to try to get them to team up with us. We’d already been working with brave patriots like Steve Schmidt and his team at SAM to block some of these facilities. But we decided to take it to the next level by creating a near-real-time notification network so that people around America can help “crowd cancel” these facilities.

If you’re playing catch up on all of this, I’ll catch you up. The long and short of it is that the administration is implementing a roughly $40 billion plan (funded by the largest immigration enforcement appropriation in American history) to build out a constellation of detention facilities. These are usually converted warehouses in towns most people couldn’t find on a map like Ashland, Virginia; Social Circle, Georgia; Surprise, Arizona; and beyond. The whole operation has been secretive, unorthodox, and creepy. Unlike any “construction” effort I ever saw in government.

Americans are now hearing about this on programs like Maddow with regularity. A community gets a letter, or a Washington Post reporter calls for comment. Then a real estate broker lets something slip. And a town of five thousand people learns that the federal government intends to lock up ten thousand human beings in a warehouse a mile from the elementary school. Sound repressive and dictator-y? It is.

Almost every time this has happened now, two things have proven true. One is that the communities, almost without exception, say no. They don’t want Trump’s secret prison in their neighborhoods, even if they voted for him. The other is that when they organize fast enough, they win. In city after city, we’re seeing folks rise up and get these project stopped by acting quickly enough.

Unfortunately, in places where they don’t get notification in time, DHS has managed to buy the warehouse and take steps to retrofit it to stuff human bodies inside — many of whom will be whisked away without adequate judicial review into horrible conditions and “disappeared” from America indefinitely.

That’s why we launched GTFOice.org. We want communities to know right away when something like this is happening. We ALSO want you to know, even if you don’t live in the area. Why? Because sometimes we need to turn up the volume in these places. A dozen locals making angry phone calls might not be enough. But when tens of thousands of voices from across America cup their hands and yell at a lazy city council or county commission, “Wake up and smell the corruption!” they tend to listen. Then they scramble and do something about it, or the real estate developer who sold the warehouse to the government says to himself, “I don’t really want all this attention. I’m out.”

Mission accomplished.

This is what crowd-cancellation looks like when it’s directed at something that actually warrants it. I’ve spent a lot of my political life watching people get crowd-canceled for things that did not deserve the term. This deserves it. And in the communities where it’s been done, it works. Just last week in Arizona, partly thanks to the amazing work of The Save America Movement to put that prison camp on the map, Attorney General Kris Mayes formally announced a lawsuit against DHS. ICE issued a preemptive stop-work order at the targeted facility, and the construction firm walked. That’s how it’s done, my friends.

Donald Trump and his henchmen cannot do this without our consent. They can try, and they are. But every facility requires a property owner willing to sell, a county willing to permit, a workforce willing to staff it, a sheriff willing to coordinate with it. Each of those is a point where a community can refuse. Each of those is also a point where the federal government (which under this administration vastly prefers to do things the easy way) will move on to the next site if the first one becomes too hard.

When we spoke with Steve Schmidt the other day, he enlightened us that this is why Auschwitz was delayed in opening. Actually. Bureaucratic resistance and permitting and local ordinances slowed down the opening of the never-to-be-forgotten Nazi concentration camp. That foot-dragging probably saved lives. But knowing what we know today, we need to engage in relentless foot stomping the moment anything even has the echoes of such a place. And we won’t stop until they do.

Maddow ended the segment the way she started, by saying she’d rarely done this kind of joint interview before, and that our cross-partisan partnership was a big part of what made the work interesting. I’d put it the other way around. The partnership is what makes the work possible. No single organization, ideological persuasion, or person can do this alone. The administration is building the national infrastructure of repression, and only collective defiance will stop it.

Sign up at GTFOice.org.

---

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

P.S. Miss the most recent DEFIANCE Daily? Monday’s episode is below. Also, don’t forget you can list to DEFIANCE Daily on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

P.P.S. What’s coming up? We’re full-time focused on saving the republic. Join us for our next broadcast. Watch LIVE for free. Members get access to the replay.

• DEFIANCE DAILY — Every weeknight @ 5pm ET. Watch our hour-long podcast LIVE on our DEFIANCE.News page, YouTube, or X — and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

• WEEKLY MISSION BRIEFING — Every Wednesday @ 5pm ET. Same ways to watch, above! Replays available afterwards.

• WEEKLY COFFEE — Every Friday @ 2pm ET. Join us on Substack or at DEFIANCE.News for Members-only coffee every Friday at 2p ET. Replays available afterwards.

• MONTHLY MEMBERS-ONLY MEETING — First Wednesday of every month @ 5pm ET. These are sent out the week of, via Zoom. Replays available afterwards.

P.P.P.S. Add us to your calendar. You can access the DEFIANCE.org Google Calendar here or add it to your Outlook/iCal/other calendars here. That way, you’ll never miss a meeting, event, or broadcast.