Opinion | Small Wins Are Possible, Even Against ICE

Recently, faced by a spreading protest-and-boycott movement, the Providence, RI-based Citizens Bank announced that it would stop lending to two private prison companies that operate many of the ghastly incarceration facilities used across the country to hold people who have been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It was a modest but distinct victory in the ongoing fight for fairness and decency.

The retreat by Citizens, the 19th-largest U.S. bank, with more than $200 billion in assets on deposit, will not cripple the two private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic. Nor will it stop brutal ICE tactics that include killing nonviolent immigrants and protesters and deporting people who have jobs, pay taxes and enjoy deep ties to their adopted communities. The number of such killings continues to tick up, as does the number of deaths of those held in ICE facilities.

But the development demonstrates that persistent, well-organized resistance works, whether it consists of pressure on municipal governments to reject new ICE concentration camps (most recently in two counties in Pennsylvania); street protests like those in Minneapolis that slow ICE arrest sweeps; or consumer boycotts like the De-ICE Citizens Bank campaign. These various forms of resistance all send a crucial signal to the Trump administration, to politicians of both parties, to corporations and to fellow citizens that there is a growing movement determined to defeat MAGA in midterm elections this November and the next presidential election in November 2028.

My use of the term “concentration camps” may sound inflammatory, but it is carefully considered. Operated largely in the dark by their private corporate owners, these facilities are barbaric. According to a recently published investigation by CNN, “nearly 50 ICE detainees [have] died since President Donald Trump returned to office last year and began pushing for mass deportations. More died in custody in 2025 than in any year in at least two decades, and 2026 is on track to be even higher.” The activist group De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition has said that more than 20 of those deaths have occurred in detention facilities operated by CoreCivic and GEO Group.

Municipal lawmakers were responding to months of street protests at Citizens branch offices, mounting media coverage and a well-crafted online campaign.

Companies aiding and abetting the Trump administration are susceptible to initiatives that hurt their public reputation and dent their bottom line. In January, in response to such protests, Avelo Airlines stopped providing ICE deportation flights.

Citizens Bank acted when cities and towns began following the lead of civil society organizations and consumers—ordinary people like my wife and me who simply closed their accounts at Citizens. A lot of this activism bubbled up in New Jersey, where GEO Group operates the notorious Delaney Hall ICE detention center in Newark. In June, the City Council of Jersey City voted unanimously to withdraw $225 million in municipal deposits from Citizens Bank; the Montclair Township Council followed suit, moving to pull $91 million from the bank, just a day after the Bloomfield Township Council decided to review its Citizens accounts with an eye toward closing them.

Municipal lawmakers were responding to months of street protests at Citizens branch offices, mounting media coverage and a well-crafted online campaign.

Under a credit facility, a borrower pays a lender a fee to make available an agreed-upon amount of money for a preset period of time. This arrangement provides borrowers with flexible access to loans and facilitates corporate planning. Citizens Bank had maintained such arrangements for years with both GEO Group and CoreCivic before it announced it would “exit” them.

The bank went out of its way to insist that it ended the prison company credit facilities as “a business decision based on changed commercial circumstances.” This explanation is unconvincing, to put it politely. The bank almost certainly had hesitated to back away from the private prison business for three reasons: It didn’t want to lose revenue, alienate corporate clients or anger the Trump administration. But the calculus changed as municipalities vowed to close accounts and activists promised to pressure additional cities and towns to do the same.

Notably, Citizens Bank had been a holdout on this score. Other major banks had already cut off the private prison industry, seeking to avoid reputational taint from association with inhumane immigrant detention. In 2019, Barclays, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and SunTrust all took steps to distance themselves from private prison operators.

I hope that the De-ICE Coalition and other resistance organizations now turn their attention and energy to targeting other corporate behavior that is facilitating the hatred and lawlessness of the Trump regime. As this happens, they should stay focused on the persecution of immigrants, which is core to the larger MAGA project of inflaming division by blaming the most vulnerable among us for societal problems. More broadly, Americans have a moral interest in demanding that our country not tolerate the abuse of a vulnerable minority, rather than going down in history as a society that looked the other way.

Paul M. Barrett, a former journalist with The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, is currently an adjunct professor at the NYU School of Law.

(Top image credit: Paul-Goyette-(CC-BY-4.0))