The Kingston Immigration Holding Centre (KIHC) is a purpose-built prison for individuals subject to security certificates, located on the grounds of Millhaven Institution in Bath, Ontario. KIHC was created in 2006 in response to controversy over the use of provincial detention facilities for long-term security-certificate detention. While the security-certificate mechanism and its related processes have been the subject of a growing body of critical socio-legal scholarship, the juridico-political space of KIHC has yet to be described or problematized in depth. The present study addresses this gap by providing a detailed account of the history of the facility and an exploration of the interactions within the Canadian insecurity field that shaped its emergence, governing arrangement, and everyday operations. Given the paucity of publicly available official information about KIHC, our study draws extensively on material obtained through requests filed under the federal Access to Information Act. Building on the existing literature, we frame security-certificate detention as a form of normalized exceptionality made possible by counter-law and argue that it conforms to the juridico-political concept of the camp. We then proceed to describe how this particular camp came into being, with an emphasis on the role played by interactions between professionals and institutions within the Canadian security field. The interagency contractual arrangement between the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) and the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) that governs KIHC is outlined. We describe this arrangement as the product of the authority to detain indefinitely meeting the capacity to confine pragmatically, under the banner of national security, and consider its implications for CSC's correctional mandate. The KIHC facility emerges as an “ancillary exception,” the institutional reflection of attempts to reform and normalize the security-certificate mechanism. We conclude by making a case for the abolition of KIHC.