Brown union to pull $500K from Citizens Bank over ICE ties.
By Christopher Shea, Rhode Island Current
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| Photo by Christopher Shea/Rhode Island Current |
A group of Boston-area churches plans to pull about $1 million if leaders at Citizens Bank do not meet with them within a week to discuss similar demands to no longer financially support U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations.
“If you do happen to know a bank that is not involved in these sorts of shady business dealings, we’d love some recommendations,” Michael Ziegler, president of AFT-RIFT Local 6516, told 300 demonstrators gathered outside Citizens’ Providence headquarters Thursday morning.
The announcements came before and after the bank’s annual shareholder meeting. As bank officials and stockowners headed inside to the meeting, protesters urged them to push the company to cut financial ties with CoreCivic and the GEO Group — two of ICE’s biggest contractors.
“We’re all here today for the same reason: to protest the reign of terror and abuse being caused by ICE in Rhode Island and across the country,” Julie Craven, one of the organizers for the De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition, told protestors and press gathered outside the bank. “Citizens Bank has been the financial engine that made it all possible.”
Peter Lucht, a spokesperson for Citizen’s Bank, declined to comment on Thursday’s protest and account-holder demands.
In a statement to the Providence Journal Wednesday, he said the bank does not comment on specific clients or sectors. All business, he said, is done through a relationship-based model “grounded in due diligence, regulatory compliance, and responsible risk management.”
But demonstrators say the ongoing relationship between Citizens Bank and ICE contractors go against the company’s stated commitment to social responsibility.
The GEO Group operates about 50 prisons and correctional facilities with more than 60,000 beds nationwide. The Florida-based firm has faced allegations that detainees at its Aurora, Colorado, facility were required to work without pay or risk up to 72 hours in solitary confinement.
The company has a $550 million line of credit with Citizens Bank, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
CoreCivic runs more than 40 prisons and has won contracts with ICE totaling more than $2 billion, its website notes. That includes a family detention facility in Dilley, Texas, which has confirmed measles cases and claims of worms or mold in children’s food.
SEC filings show that the Tennessee-based firm borrowed $500 million from Citizens in 2024.
“This Providence-based Bank, which touts itself as community centered and socially responsible, has helped finance the largest and deadliest immigration incarceration system this country has ever seen,” Craven said to a series of boos.
After learning about those relationships, Ziegler said that having the AFT-RIFT Local 6516 keep its money at Citizens Bank was no longer an option. The union represents more than 2,000 graduate student workers, postdoctoral scholars and some undergraduate employees at the private Ivy League university — hundreds of whom are noncitizen workers, he noted.
“For us, ICE is a workplace safety issue,” Ziegler said. “We are not going to have it be the case that our members’ dues are going to be used to help finance the camps that are going to detain them.”
State Rep. David Morales, a Providence Democrat running for mayor of Rhode Island’s capital, said Citizens’ continued financing only enables further alleged human rights abuses at ICE detention centers.
“Budgets are a moral document, budgets tell you the priorities of an institution,” Morales told the crowd. “It is absolutely shameful that any Citizens Bank customer unknowingly is putting forward funds and financing that is contributing to those atrocities and violation of our neighbors’ rights.”
The De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition began its campaign against the Rhode Island financial institution in January, starting with protests inside the Providence headquarters along with demonstrations at branch locations across the Northeast.
In March, the coalition sent a letter to CEO Bruce Van Saun and board members formally demanding that the bank end its financial ties with the CoreCivic and the GEO Group immediately. The group has not received a response, Craven said.
“The bank is hoping we will go away,” she told the crowd. “They are wrong. We won’t stop until they stop.”
Members of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, a coalition of 60 religious groups and unions, said their requests to meet with bank officials had gone unanswered. That changed Thursday, when faith leaders who hold shares in the bank attended the shareholder meeting and Van Saun agreed to meet with them in the near future to discuss their concerns.
Faith leaders are demanding that the meeting be held no later than April 30, the Most Rev. Steve Watson of Reservoir Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told Rhode Island Current
“If they do not respond to us, we’ll withdraw our first million from the bank and continue to accelerate our pressure,” Watson said. “These companies are creating perverse incentives to detain and incarcerate residents, denying them of their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That’s fundamentally un-American and certainly fundamentally in violation of our faiths to honor all humans as image-bearers of God.”
The interfaith organization holds around $12.7 million in the bank.
Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, said in a statement to Rhode Island Current that the firm values its relationship with its financial partners and defended its reputation
“Our responsibility is to care for each person respectfully and humanely while they receive the legal due process that they are entitled to,” Gustin said. “We don’t cut corners on care, staff, or training, which meets, and in many cases exceeds, our government partners’ standards.”
A spokesperson for the GEO Group did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Aside from labor and religious pressure, Citizens Bank is allegedly facing an unrelated set of demands from a cybercriminal group called Everest. On April 20, online ransomware trackers noted that the Everest criminal group had posted to its dark web site a ransom post which threatened to leak information it had exfiltrated from Citizens within seven days.
While Citizens did not respond to multiple Rhode Island Current inquiries on Tuesday about the breach, it did release a statement later that day which addressed the claims, noting that the bank has been “managing an incident involving data extracted from a third party vendor.”
“[M]ost of this was masked test data, although a limited set of information for a small number of customers was involved,” the statement read. “There is no evidence of unauthorized access to the Citizens network, and our operations continue as normal.”
Reporter Alexander Castro contributed to this story.
- 7:04 pm Correction: AFT-RIFT Local 6516 has not yet withdrawn its funds from Citizens Bank. The union intends to move its funds to a new institution within a week of its announcement.
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