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On Thursday, hundreds of demonstrators from the Northeast region of the United States gathered outside the Citizens Bank annual shareholders’ meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, to protest against the company’s financial relationships with for-profit prison corporations that operate facilities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
A group of organizations calling themselves the De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition is demanding that the bank end its relationship with ICE, specifically by halting its financial ties with CoreCivic and The GEO Group, prison corporations that work on behalf of the federal agency.
The demand comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s massive crackdown on immigration, which has included the kidnapping and detention of immigrants without respect for due process, deployment of militarized immigration agencies in major American cities, immigration agents fatally shooting two protesters, and dozens of immigrants dying in detention facilities across the country.
Organizers are hopeful that Citizens Bank, which has responded positively to calls for action in the past, will respond to protestors’ demands.
“The bank has a deeply ingrained reputation for social responsibility, community-centered banking,” Peyton Fleming, spokesperson for the De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition, said in an interview with Truthout.
Fleming said the coalition was not naive, however, noting that this characterization of the bank is “mostly an old narrative.”
“The leadership of the bank is different than it was 20 years ago,” he lamented.
Still, “we’ve been pressuring the bank to change these relationships,” Fleming added. “We sent a letter in March, but we haven’t received a response.”
In addition to protests outside the shareholders’ meeting, the coalition has shareholders who will be inside Citizens Bank headquarters. Those shareholders plan to ask executives, “Why are you continuing to be in this line of business that every other major bank in the U.S. has gotten out of back in 2019?” Fleming said.
According to the De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition’s website, the bank has given The GEO Group and CoreCivic more than $2.5 billion in financing, including $100 million alone in January of this year.
“More than half of the approximately 70,000 people in ICE detention facilities are in a CoreCivic or GEO Group facility,” the coalition points out on its website.
In addition to urging Citizens Bank to end these relationships by telling current customers to “flood” the inboxes, voicemails, and social media of company executives, the coalition is also encouraging customers to move their money to other financial institutions until Citizens Bank makes the change.
Also on Thursday, in the spirit of encouraging customers to switch banks, two groups with large investments in Citizens Bank, which are part of the De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition, said they were either cutting ties with the institution or would do so in the near future, if their demands were not taken seriously.
One of those groups was composed of unionized Brown University workers, represented by AFT-RIFT Local 6516, who announced that they planned to close their accounts with Citizens over the bank’s ties to ICE.
“We’re going to be de-banking from Citizens Bank. We’re pulling out hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said AFT-RIFT chapter president Michael Ziegler.
“For us, ICE is a workplace safety issue,” Ziegler added, citing the “hundreds of noncitizen workers” the union represents at Brown.
The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO), a coalition of more than 60 religious groups and unions, also announced that its members would move their funds away from the bank, amounting to $1 million in total, if the bank didn’t end its relationships with The GEO Group and CoreCivic.
As a result of the demonstration, Citizens Bank CEO Bruce Van Saun announced that he would agree to meet with GBIO members, leaders of the organization said.
“Their response was that they’d be willing to meet, and our response was we would expect that would happen in the next seven days,” GBIO member Rev. Ray Hammond said. “If we are not in a meeting by that time or have arranged the meeting by that time, we’ll be pulling out our first $1 million.”
Other members of the coalition said they intend to continue pressuring the bank beyond today’s action.
“We fully intend to turn up the heat on Citizens Bank until it ends this deplorable, immoral and greedy line of business,” said Julie Craven, a member of the De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition. “The bank is hoping we’ll get tired and go away. They are wrong.”
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