AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We look now at a growing boycott against Citizens Bank amidst 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 is now withdrawing a million dollars from its estimated $14 million account with the bank. The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization plans to continue pulling out a million at a time, until the bank addresses its concerns.

This is senior minister of Old South Church in Boston, Bishop John Edgerton, explaining the decision on MS NOW.

REV. JOHN EDGERTON: We pulled a million dollars out today. We transferred it to another bank, because we want Citizens to stop doing this dirty business. Citizens is one of the only banks in the country that banks with and provides financing for CoreCivic and GEO Group, two of the most notorious private prison companies in this country. This year, Emmanuel Damas, who is a neighbor, a Boston resident, a 56-year-old man, he died in CoreCivic detention in Arizona from a toothache. He had a toothache. He complained about it. They didn’t give him proper care. His toothache became an infection, his infection became sepsis, and he died. And these are the practices that CoreCivic is notorious for and GEO Group is notorious for. And they will not be abusing our neighbors, not with our money.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Reverend John Edgerton, speaking to Rachel Maddow.

A Citizens Bank spokesperson responded to Democracy Now! in a statement that said, quote, “Citizens is deeply committed to the communities we serve — investing $2 billion in 2025 to help build or preserve more than 8,000 affordable housing units, contributing over 265,000 volunteer hours, and partnering with nonprofits across our footprint. People have strong and often differing views on issues like immigration. It’s an important public policy debate — but it’s not the role of banks to set policy. Our role is to follow the law and apply our standards consistently as we serve all of our clients,” Citizens Bank said to Democracy Now!

For more, we’re joined by two guests here in New York. Julie Cohen is an Oscar-nominated director who’s made many films, including RBG, about the Supreme Court justice, Every Body, My Name is Pauli Murray. She and her husband, Paul Barrett, who is a former reporter with The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Businessweek, wrote an op-ed this weekend for NJ.com about their decision to close their accounts at Citizens Bank over the bank’s complicity with Delaney Hall and other ICE jails.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Thank you so much for being with us. Julie, let’s start with you. Talk about what this Citizens Bank campaign is all about, and about your personal decision.

JULIE COHEN: Yeah. The campaign to protest Citizens Bank is about their complicity. They finance both GEO Group, which operates Delaney Hall and other ICE detention, and CoreCivic, which operates the Dilley center in Texas, which you may remember is where Liam Ramos was held, and many other children are still being held. And the idea is to basically use our collective economic power to speak out about those who are kind of aiding and abetting the system.

I’m taken aback hearing the statement that Citizens Bank just gave you. I’m hearing it for the first time just now. But there was a phrase in there where he said they’re committed to upholding the law. Well, some of what’s going on — a lot of what’s going on in these ICE detention facilities is not lawful, because people are being detained there, immigrant neighbors, most of whom have not committed any crime beyond immigration violations, are being held there without due process. So, that’s unconstitutional, so they’re not upholding the law if they’re helping finance these facilities.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain. We’re talking about hunger and labor, a hunger and a labor strike inside the jail. The labor part of it isn’t talked about as much. While DHS denies this is going on, interestingly, the border czar, Tom Homan, has talked about force-feeding, though he has denied that the hunger strike is happening.

JULIE COHEN: Yeah, he’s done all kinds of things. He’s denied the hunger strike is happening. He’s saying that they might have to have to force-feed people, which you obviously wouldn’t have to do if there was no hunger strike. And he has also deeply inaccurately claimed that the reason — this just happened, I think, on Fox yesterday — he was saying the reason that the hunger strikers are striking is because they feel that they have the right to the ethnic food of their home countries — made up out of whole cloth. The issue is their unconstitutional incarceration. They also have complained about conditions, including putrid water, not enough food, and worms in their food. Nobody’s talking about wanting to get their own specialized ethnic food. That’s just crap.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Barrett, you’re a former reporter with The Wall Street Journal and with Businessweek. If you can talk about CoreCivic and GEO, these corporations, and Citizens Bank’s relationship with them?

PAUL BARRETT: Sure. These are major corporations that require continued financing from banks and other financial institutions in order to operate. Over more than a dozen years, Citizens Bank has arranged for and helped provide some $2 billion in financing for GEO Group and CoreCivic. Without that money, these corporations literally could not function.

In 2019, other major banks and financial institutions pulled back from precisely this type of financing, not because of what’s going on in Delaney Hall. Delaney Hall wasn’t open at that time. They pulled back because they could see that association with the private prison industry was hurting their brand reputation. And they said, “No more. We’re out of this business.” Banks do care about what consumers think about their business.

Citizens just decided to stay in, to keep taking the profits from this financing, and, as a result, now finds itself enmeshed in this, you know, obscene policy of the Trump administration. And we’re just calling for them to step back. They can just stop doing it. It’s not that complicated.

AMY GOODMAN: Last year, during a quarterly earnings call for the private prison company GEO Group, the CEO, David Donahue, claimed that Delaney Hall, another ICE detention center in Michigan, North Lake, would represent potentially an additional $130 million in annual revenue and the need for over 160,000 ICE detention beds nationwide.

DAVID DONAHUE: Today, the Delaney Hall and North Lake contract announcements represent in excess of $130 million of this annualized revenue potential. However, these facilities are expected to generate only partial revenue and earnings contribution in 2025 due to the timing of these facility activations. As a reminder, once a contract has been awarded, our typical facility activation period is 60 to 90 days to hire, train and clear staff and to get the facility ready for occupancy, followed by a gradual ramp-up in utilization. As we have previously discussed, before the passage of the Laken Riley Act, the Trump administration had indicated a need to ramp up to a 100,000 total ICE detention beds for increased interior enforcement operations. Based on public statements from ICE, the implementation of the Laken Riley Act could require an incremental 60,000 ICE detention beds or more. We continue to believe that an increase to between 100,000 and 160,000 total detention beds will require a range of solutions for the detention and processing of migrants in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s David Donahue, CEO of GEO Group, the for-profit prison company that runs Delaney Hall. Paul Barrett?

PAUL BARRETT: Well, one of GEO Group’s top former officials has just become the top official of ICE.

AMY GOODMAN: Today, actually.

PAUL BARRETT: Today, right.

AMY GOODMAN: June 1st.

PAUL BARRETT: A guy named Venturella. And this indicates the tight enmeshment between the Trump administration policy, this private prison corporation and, in turn, Citizens Bank, which provides vital financing that GEO Group needs to operate. So this is what we want to see disentangled. We want to see Citizens Bank walking away from this situation.

AMY GOODMAN: Julie, you write in your piece at NJ.com, “There are multiple ways to protest the Trump anti-immigrant agenda, and not all of them require you to show up in person at an ICE detention facility.” You talk about pressuring “your local government to refuse to allow ICE to open one of its privately operated jails where you live.” Can you describe how this has happened around the country? And also, you and Paul have been protesting outside Delaney dozens of times.

JULIE COHEN: Yeah, I mean, we’ve been going to Delaney pretty much ever since it opened last spring. We were there the same week, I think just the day — maybe the day before or the day after Representative McIver was arrested there, and is still facing potentially 17 years in prison, by the way, another thing that should be protested vehemently.

AMY GOODMAN: This is LaMonica McIver, the New Jersey congressmember, who said she was trying to protect the mayor who was arrested, Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark.

JULIE COHEN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: And she has been indicted by Alina Habba, actually, was the U.S. attorney at the time —

JULIE COHEN: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — who’s been removed because they said she was unlawfully there as U.S. attorney —

JULIE COHEN: Right, right.

AMY GOODMAN: — President Trump’s former personal attorney.

JULIE COHEN: Yeah, it’s just illegality on top of illegality, which is almost leading me to forget what I was saying. But we go there. You know, you had earlier on the show one of the mutual aid supporters of the people detained there and their families, Sally. And really, we’ve just been — there are people there every single day. Paul and I had been going about once a week, you know, just for a few hours, to support what they’re doing and to just stand outside with signs kind of reminding the community, which on that strip of Newark is basically short-haul truckers, what’s going on inside, holding up signs saying “No detention without due process,” saying “No concentration camps in the U.S.A.”

AMY GOODMAN: And what are the shoes?

JULIE COHEN: OK, yes. So, the mutual aid groups, one thing that they do is help make sure that visitors can get inside the facility to see their loved ones at the scheduled visiting time. The guards at Delaney come up with a kind of an ever-shifting list of reasons that people could be kept out. And often a wife will be kept out because she’s not wearing the right kind of shoes. She has open-toed shoes. In some cases she’s wearing Crocs. She’s wearing yoga pants. The mutual aid —

AMY GOODMAN: There’s a dress code to visit?

JULIE COHEN: Well, there is a dress code, but the problem is that the dress code tends to change and shift over time, so people are never quite sure, and depending on what guard is at the gate. You know, there’s no waiting room inside. This isn’t like a regular prison. There’s like this little outdoor — now, first there was nothing, and then there’s like a few kind of stadium bleachers with a little thing over them. And so, if someone goes up and says, “No, you can’t see your husband,” who was grabbed, like in one case, you know, while he was out getting diapers for your kids, “You can’t see your husband now, because you’re wearing Crocs,” then there’s this mutual aid tent that’s right out there saying, “Hey, what size shoes do you wear? We have shoes. We have pants if you need pants.” And that’s what — and people are then able to go in to see their loved ones.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Paul Barrett, the pressuring of local governments to refuse to allow ICE to open jails in their community?

PAUL BARRETT: Right. Well, this is actually succeeding all across the country. There are many communities in multiple states, including New Jersey, where local pressure on city councilmen and mayors and so forth is actually causing the communities to put up barriers to the opening of these facilities. And people just need to keep the pressure up, because there is a successful campaign to slow down this process. And I will predict that in coming months, I think we’re going to see ICE backing away from opening some of these facilities altogether.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us, Paul Barrett, former reporter at The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Businessweek, and Julie Cohen, Oscar-nominated filmmaker who made film including RBG. They wrote an op-ed this weekend for NJ.com about their decision to close their accounts at Citizens Bank because of the bank’s complicity with Delaney Hall and other ICE detention camps or jails. And actually, Saturday is a big day of action, Julie.

JULIE COHEN: Yes. We are taking part. We didn’t start this movement, but we have joined in enthusiastically in a national day of action. Anyone who wants to check it out can go to De-ICECitizensBank.org, and you will find right now there are more than 90 protests planned outside Citizens branches all over the Northeast, Midwest. There’s the map of it. If there isn’t one near your Citizens, just set one up yourself. We did. We’ve been going to our friends’, at Montclair Indivisible’s, and then we decided we would do our own in Bloomfield this weekend. So, you can just click on and find out where the one nearest is, show up with your Citizens sign, or someone will give you a sign. It’s so easy, and it’s so worth doing. And this citizen pressure really has made a difference. It had — it stopped Avelo Airlines from, you know, flying detainees out of the country —

AMY GOODMAN: Deportation flights.

JULIE COHEN: — doing deportation flights. Like, citizen action can really make a difference, and that’s what we’re not banking on.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank Julie Cohen and Paul Barrett.