Advocates Call for Boycott of Citizens Bank for Financing ICE Jails

We look at a growing boycott against Citizens Bank amid a campaign to pressure the corporation to divest from financing CoreCivic and GEO Group, two of the nation’s largest private operators of ICE jails. An interfaith coalition of dozens of religious groups in Boston said Citizens Bank has failed to adequately address its concern about financing private prisons, so the group has withdrawn $1 million from its estimated $14 million account with the bank and threatened to keep removing funds until its demands are met.

Filmmaker Julie Cohen and journalist Paul Barrett, who are married, recently wrote an opinion piece about closing their account at Citizens Bank over its complicity with Delaney Hall and other ICE jails.

“Over more than a dozen years, Citizens Bank has arranged for and helped provide some $2 billion in financing for GEO Group and CoreCivic,” says Barrett, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Businessweek. “Without that money, these corporations literally could not function.”

“The idea is to basically use our collective economic power to speak out about those who are aiding and abetting” the immigrant detention system in the United States, adds Cohen. “A lot of what’s going on in these ICE detention facilities is not lawful because … immigrant neighbors, most of whom have not committed any crime beyond immigration violations, are being held there without due process.”