Citizens Bank in one form or another has been my personal bank for more than three decades. Its branches and ATMS are conveniently sprinkled along a corridor from Ohio to the east coast, a frequently-traveled route for my family.
It’s a bank so it does bank things: invests to make money, charges interest to make money, charges fees to make money–like any business, it’s in business to make money. Despite its French Revolution-ish moniker, no one would have any illusions about its purpose, nor any expectation of largesse or kindness.
But as a customer, it’s still unsettling to learn that Rhode Island-based Citizens has become a significant player in bankrolling the two companies behind the incarceration and monitoring apparatus of Trump’s ICE machine, Core Civic and GEO Group.
In the Public Interest wrote a report a decade ago on the banks then financing private prisons which was followed up in 2019 with a brief about banks backing away from the industry. More recently, we wrote about how local governments are using their economic clout to put pressure on a variety of their contractors who have engaged in other contracts with ICE-related work. It would seem the trend would be leaning against support for the private prison industry in general, and its current partnership with ICE especially.
But in fact, Citizens never walked away from their commitment to private prisons. And as recently as January of this year–as the Trump administration pumped new life into the industry with its promise to incarcerate record numbers of undocumented people–Citizens granted GEO an increase in the revolving credit up to more than half a billion dollars.
As we pointed out in this fact sheet from 2016, private prisons are constantly in the market for new people to lock up, and they hit gold with Trump’s second administration, as reflected in this recent outlook from Simply Wall St. regarding GEO Group: “While analyst consensus broadly expects $500 million to $600 million of annualized revenue from expanding ICE detention to 32,000 beds, actual ramp could be far larger as ICE pushes to secure 100,000 beds, unlocking up to $1.5 billion in additional high-margin revenues….”
A new campaign, De-ICE Citizens Bank, has been launched to bring attention to Citizens’ role in financing ICE and put pressure on its leadership–including shareholders–to end the bank’s relationship with Core Civic and GEO Group.
It’s also encouraging people to disinvest from the bank on their own account–or accounts. With automatic deposits and auto-pay for bills, disentangling from a bank can be a tall (or at least time-consuming) order for individuals. But a number of large institutional bank customers have decided to withdraw their funds from Citizens accounts. This week, the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization pledged–with an enormous bank withdrawal slip–to withdraw a million dollars of its $14 million in deposits at Citizens and promised to escalate the practice until it has meaningful discussions with bank management. The union representing working graduate and undergraduate students at Brown University, which is located in Providence, Citizens’ headquarters, planned to withdraw nearly half a million dollars.
Citizens might not be too concerned about the loss of life and liberties at ICE facilities or the loss of constitutional rights in communities. But the loss of revenue–that’s something it might pay attention to.
Jeff Hagan
Communications Director