The People’s Shareholder Meeting to De-ICE Citizens Bank: Hundreds protest the bank's support of private prisons and ICE

"The companies they finance, CoreCivic and The GEO Group, have long and well-documented records of medical neglect and preventable deaths at their facilities..."

Apr 24, 2026

Toward the end of the two-hour protest outside the corporate headquarters of Citizens Bank in Providence, Rhode Island, members of the De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition who were inside the shareholder meeting stepped up to the mic to report on what happened. They each held shares (or at least one share) of Citizens Bank stock, which entitled them to be in the room with the board members and the CEO, Bruce Van Saun.

“Inside the meeting, it was business as usual,” said Rich Gato. “They had an agenda. They read off all the statistics about their great financial performance. They’re doing really well. Citizens Bank is very profitable.

“At the end of the meeting, there was a chance for us to ask questions. Our members asked three questions. The questions revolved around Citizens’ efforts to promote a positive community image as community builders. The questions challenged them on how their support of The Geo Group and CoreCivic can be construed as building communities.
“I buttonholed Citizens CEO Van Saun on the way out of the meeting. He said to me, ‘I want to reassure you we are going to take a hard look at how these companies are performing.’ And I said to him, ‘I know that if you do that, you’ll choose to end these relationships.’
“I don’t think Citizens would be taking any hard look without the organized pressure that’s coming from the coalition, so we’ve got to keep it up. We’ve got to step it up. I think if we keep going, we have a shot at this, but it’s not easy. We’re going to have to stay with this for the long run.”

The three questions:

“Good morning. I’m Reverend Ray Hammond from Boston. I’m a former director of Citizens Bank of Massachusetts, a customer of Citizens for 30 years, and a member of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization whose affiliates hold at least $12.7 million in accounts with Citizens.
- “In the past, I was proud to be a part of, work with, and do business with the former Citizens Bank, which was known for its support of the communities it served, including the immigrant members of those communities. Today, I am appalled by Citizens Bank and the significant moral, reputational, and branding risks it has incurred due to its financial ties to two companies, CoreCivic and The GEO Group.
- “These two companies are responsible for abuses against and the deaths of inmates and detainees under their care, and they are deeply tied to ICE, an agency that has killed American citizens and continues to terrorize our immigrant neighbors. Does the current Citizens Bank intend to continue its financial ties to these companies, and will it commit today to meeting with the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization as previously requested to discuss this issue directly?”
“I was next,” said Barbara Katzenberg. “My question was, ‘I am with the De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition, and those are the folks who are outside chanting. The bank’s filings highlight its vulnerability to adverse market perception in an industry where integrity, customer trust, and confidence are paramount. Citizens’ financial support to private prison companies, Core Civic and The Geo Group, both with long track records of human rights violations at prisons they operate for ICE, creates just such an adverse market perception, and that concerns us as shareholders. Will Citizens consider cutting ties with these companies to restore customer trust and reduce reputational risk?”
“My name is Charlie Homer. I’m a shareholder and a member of both the De-ICE Citizens Coalition and the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization.
In the bank’s public response to recent protests over Citizens’ financing of private prison companies under contract to ICE, a bank spokesperson said that Citizens engages with companies that conduct their business lawfully. However, both CoreCivic and The GEO Group have been the subject of numerous investigations, government fines, and class action lawsuits that identify severe understaffing, detainee mistreatment, forced labor, and, as I am a physician, inadequate medical care resulting in deaths and many other issues. What will it take for Citizens Bank to determine that these companies are not operating lawfully and exit their relationships?”

“They responded that they would be willing to meet,” said Reverend Hammond. “We responded that we would expect that to be the case within the next seven days. If we are not in a meeting by that time or have not arranged one, we will pull out our first $1 million.”

Julie Craven

“It’s an honor to be here with so many people, including young people with their drive and passion. We’re united by our courage and our outrage against ICE brutality and the banks that finance ICE brutality. My name is Julie Craven, Cambridge Indivisible, and a member of the De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition, which is leading this campaign against Citizens Bank. We have helped orchestrate the series of events taking place today as Citizens holds its annual shareholders’ meeting. Partnering with us today are Brown Rise Up, Little Rhodie Visibility Brigade, Jewish Voice for Peace Rhode Island, South County Rising, and East Bay Citizens for Peace, along with many other activist groups from Rhode Island and beyond.
“We’re all here today for the same reason: to protest the reign of terror and abuse being carried out by ICE in Rhode Island and across the country, and to protest the major bank that is enabling ICE’s brutal agenda, Citizens Bank, which is headquartered in the building behind me.
“While we are outraged by the pain and suffering that ICE has caused for hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their families and communities, our biggest focus today is on Citizens Bank and its culpability in bankrolling this brutal crackdown that has roughly 70,000 immigrants locked up in ICE prisons.
“Citizens Bank has been the financial engine that’s made it all possible. Since 2012, it has provided more than $2 billion in financing to for-profit prison giants CoreCivic and The GEO Group. Facilities run by these companies hold more than half of the 70,000 people detained. Some of this financing was approved as recently as January, specifically for the GeoGroup, ICE’s largest contractor.
“Citizens Bank chose this role. While other major banks pulled out of the private prison industry in 2019 under pressure from immigration activists, Citizens Bank strengthened its ties by providing loans, credit, and underwriting bonds. 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.
“The companies they finance, CoreCivic and The GEO Group, have long and well-documented records of medical neglect and preventable deaths at their facilities. 21 people have died at their facilities in just the past 16 months. A report published last week in the medical journal JAMA said the death rate at ICE facilities in recent months is at a 22-year high. The report concluded that as the number of people in immigration detention has soared under the Trump Administration, conditions have worsened.
“Our campaign is focused on forcing Citizens Bank to stop financing private prisons, stop enabling ICE, stop abetting the spiral of terror that is ripping communities apart, and stop profiting from people’s pain.
“The pressure on the bank is building. The two dozen protests we held at Citizens Bank branches in a handful of states in January swelled to more than 70 protests in 13 states in March. Our numbers are growing and our reach expanding to include local activists, students, clergy, unions, people of all ages, and more. We stand united.
“In early March. We sent a letter to the CEO demanding that the bank immediately end its financial ties to the prison companies. No response. The bank is also hearing from its customers, individuals, unions, and nonprofit groups who are unhappy that their money is being used in this way. You will hear more about that in just a minute. We intend to turn up the heat on Citizens Bank until it ends this deplorable, immoral, and greedy line of business. The bank is hoping we will go away. They are wrong. We won’t stop until they stop.”

Michael Ziegler: RIFT Local 6516 stops doing business with Citizens

“I am the president of RIFT Local 6516. We’re a labor union representing more than 2000 workers at Brown University. We represent graduate workers like myself. I’m a PhD candidate in the classics department at Brown. We also represent postdoctoral scholars and several categories of undergraduate employment. I’m here today because our local has been a Citizen’s customer since our beginning. However, in light of what we’ve learned about Citizens’ practices, I’m announcing today that we are debanking with Citizens. We have had hundreds of thousands of dollars in deposits invested in Citizens. That will no longer be the case.
“Our reasoning for that is simple: For us, ICE is a workplace safety issue. We represent hundreds of non-citizen workers on Brown’s campus. We are not going to allow our members’ dues to be used to help finance the camps that would detain them.
“I can give an anecdote: For those of you who aren’t from Providence, the Superior Court is located just down the hill from Brown’s campus. I can tell you that at one point, ICE was trying to kidnap what I believe was a teenager from the courthouse back in the fall, where I had a colleague of mine teaching. He looked out the window and saw an ICE officer threaten what appeared to be a student with a taser. It’s our workers who are at risk. It’s the students we teach who are at risk. And for those reasons, we can no longer do business with this bank. If you do happen to know of a bank that’s not involved in these sorts of shady business dealings, we’d love some recommendations.”

Myra Maguene Muniz:

“ICE has been terrorizing our communities for far too long. Our neighbors, friends, coworkers, and family are at stake. When I decided to go to university outside my home state, my biggest goal was to provide care to the community I would be living in for the next four years. At this moment, that means protecting community members from ICE. The constant ICE kidnappings that we witnessed at the Garrahy Judicial Complex, including on Monday and Tuesday of this week, cannot be viewed as normal. No one can turn a blind eye to it.
“The fear and anxiety that Providence and the nation have been facing are simply unacceptable. I joined this fight against Citizens Bank and ICE because our community needs to be rid of hate and of fear. We know that ICE does not operate in isolation. It relies on airlines to fly deportation flights, hotels to house its agents, and critically, private prison companies to operate its detention centers. Citizens Bank is the main financial provider for two of those companies, CoreCivic and The Geo Group. In the past 16 months, 21 people have died in their detention centers. Shame. Citizens Bank has provided $2.5 billion in financing to them.
“Today is critical. In this building, the decision makers at Citizens Bank are meeting. They choose if Citizens Bank will continue to enable ICE terror. We stand here today to make sure that business cannot run as usual so long as that business ends in grave human rights abuses. Brown Rise Up is a Brown University student group that was formed in response to Trump’s attacks on higher education. As students, we know this is not an isolated incident. We cannot just fight authoritarian attacks on our campuses. Fighting for a brighter future means being part of a bigger movement that can win a world where we fund housing and education, not prisons and terror.”

Representative David Morales

“Neighbors, we are gathered here today to send a very clear message to Citizens Bank. Cages are not communities. You can put out as many mission statements as you want, talking about how you value and care for the communities you serve and lend to. But the reality is, as long as there is financing going to the terrors of ICE, going towards the contractors like CoreCivic and the GEO Group that have documented abuses of our fellow neighbors, they cannot claim to care about the community. Budgets are a mortal document. Budgets reveal an institution’s priorities. And we have watched. Citizens Bank not only enables but doubles down on its investment in these human rights abuses.
“It is absolutely shameful that any Citizens Bank customer unknowingly is putting forward funds and financing that is contributing to these atrocities, that is contributing to these violations of our neighbors’ rights, because, as it has been said before, across the country, we have watched as ICE terrorizes our communities. Here in Providence, we have seen documented cases where ICE has shown up in front of our courthouse, in front of a hospital, and even in front of our schools. And so it is not enough for Citizens Bank to have a mission statement or a press release that talks about their volunteer days or the ways they’re, quote-unquote, giving back to our community. What we need to see is real action. And real action looks like divestment from these human rights abuses. And this is why it has become a nationwide movement. State by state, we are watching as community members rise and make it absolutely clear that we do not want financial institutions in our backyard that are going to contribute to the abuses of human rights that are going to contribute to the abuses of our immigrant community.
“We stand in solidarity and send a clear message to the shareholders of Citizens Bank as they meet that they have the responsibility, the moral responsibility to divest, to demand better from the executives, and to, once and for all, divest away from us, divest away from the terrors that are harming our neighbors.”

Raya Gupta

“I’m an organizer with Brown Rise Up. The People’s Shareholder meeting speaks to the source of our power: all of us out here today. That’s what makes our movement strong and able to win. We don’t have a ton of money or seats at the decision-making table, but that isn’t the kind of power that we’re after, not for what we’re trying to do. We need to change the rules of this game to shift away from this logic of profit at all costs. This isn’t easy to do, but it’s worth fighting for. A crucial part of fighting is understanding that ICE is not just a Trump problem, nor is this type of state-sanctioned violence new to Black and brown communities in the U.S., who have long been excluded from American democracy.
“The prison industry, for example, was unjust long before ICE. Just take the example of the convict police system, when, in the aftermath of slavery, hundreds of thousands of Black people were imprisoned, and their labor was leased out to private employers. Today, CoreCivic operates a voluntary work program in which people in its private prisons are forced to work for as little as a dollar a day.
“ICE operates under the same logic of dehumanization as the rest of this system to exploit vulnerable populations in the U.S. and across the world. When we speak across the world, we have to reflect on why many immigrants come to the U.S. in the first place. Oftentimes, they’re forced to flee conditions created by U.S. economic and military intervention, and then, when they come here, they are met with threats of criminalization and deportation.
“One of my friends lived part of this story. She’s a Yemeni refugee who had to flee her home when she was a child, and then she got a full scholarship to come to college here. But because she only had a Yemeni passport, her visa was denied. The only reason I’m in college here instead of her and have these opportunities is that I have an American passport, and I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think we should live in a world where our passports determine the type of future we have.
“We also have to remember that President Obama deported three million people during his presidency, that Democrats voted to keep funding genocide in Palestine, and that our systems are built to serve the interests of the richest and exploit minorities to retain power and control. All of this is what we have to refuse if we want to push back. And if we want to push back, we have to understand the depth of our struggle and build alternatives, which is why we’re out here today.
“As we move forward to continue building this movement against ICE violence, we have to remember that we are standing on the shoulders of decades of grassroots immigrant organizing against ICE, including before Trump. The movement we are building is bigger than a single coalition fighting back against a single bank.
“On a historical scale, and as we look across the country today, students at colleges are running campaigns to get their universities to end contracts with Enterprise Car Rentals, which rents vehicles to ICE. Avelo Airlines stopped operating deportation flights due to activist pressure. We’re all out here outside Citizens Bank today to demand they stop financing ICE detention centers, and that’s the tip of the iceberg.
“At the same time, we have communities organizing to push ICE out of our neighborhoods and away from the courthouses where they try to kidnap people going to their hearings. This type of work is happening in Providence to keep community members safe, and it’s so important. I’m proud to be a member of the Deportation Defense Network.
“ICE is unrelenting, but so are we. They were at the courthouse on Wednesday and Thursday last week. They were here this week, Monday and Tuesday, but we were here too, and we pushed them out. They did not take anyone, and that is an important win. That is what ‘keeping us safe’ means.”

If you live in Rhode Island and you aren’t already plugged into the Deportation Defense Network, save the number right now. It’s 401-675-1414. I’m going to say it again. 401-675-1414.

Reverend D.L. Helfer

“This isn’t a new story, right? We know that evil committed by people in power is an old, old story. And as I thought about it, I’m like, “Well, what’s the story I need to tell you?” and I want to tell you the story of Jesus and the moneylenders. The moneylenders back in biblical times had a history of usury, of charging huge rates to the people, not caring about the people, but only about profit. Does this sound familiar? They don’t care what harm they cause, so pretty soon, the moneylenders have set up their lending inside the temple. They have taken the most sacred place to do their work. Does it sound familiar?
“So along comes Jesus. He doesn’t have any institutional power, but he does have a following. He has people power. Because the people see he’s fighting with and for them, not with the powers that be. Jesus asks the moneylenders to stop. They don’t. Sound familiar? He demands they stop. Sound familiar? He loses patience. He enters the temple where the moneylenders are doing their dirty work, and he literally starts flipping over tables. Money is going everywhere. That’s when they start to listen. This is where we find ourselves now. With moneylenders in this case, Citizens Bank, knowingly harming by investing in for-profit prisons, by investing in prisons at all, knowing full well that they are supporting the aims of the authoritarian regime to take the power and the freedom of the people. Are we letting that happen?
“At this point in the campaign, our option is to start flipping over tables. Our option is escalation. We started with the conversation. They refused to meet with us. We protested, and when we attempted to close accounts a couple of weeks ago, they threatened us. I’m not suggesting violence in any way. I’m really not. But our response, faithful or otherwise, because I know we represent a variety of beliefs here - I’m a Unitarian Universalist, after all - What I know for sure is that everyone here in Rhode Island, our Massachusetts friends, is willing to keep showing up and showing up to take our money out and to encourage others to do the same, to write and protest until this evil ends.
“And it is evil. When one uses money to fund another’s harm, that is the very definition of evil. I was one of the clergy who answered the call to Minnesota in mid-January when it was like 20 degrees below zero, to help fight back against the terror that ICE was and is still wreaking. They were kidnapping people off the street and sending them to prisons. They were disappearing them without rights, process, or cause, so many can’t be found. We know how many have died in custody, and we know that they murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti in broad daylight.
“Hurt. Murder. And while that community mourns deeply, it has fought back just as you are. It has fought back the way we know is needed and what works by checking on each other day after day, bringing groceries to each other, guarding people the way the deportation defense line does, by guarding those most at risk.
“They haven’t stopped. We won’t stop because we know this is how we get free, by taking care of each other. Who takes care of us? We take care of us by pushing back ceaselessly against corporations that do the wrong thing. We did the same thing at Target. We reminded them that either they can stop working with ICE, or we can all disappear, and so will their profits, and they have heard us.
“We don’t use our money to support evil. We use our money to care for each other, and we will ensure that, in this case, the moneylenders, including Citizens Bank, will not be allowed to fund for-profit prisons that harm our most vulnerable. I want to close by talking about what happened to Jesus after he flipped the tables. The authorities rushed to arrest him, but they couldn’t because the crowds were too big. There were too many people, and they couldn’t arrest everyone. People understood their power to stop the evil doers, and that’s our call, to be too many to stop, to be too relentless to stop, to force Citizens Bank to stop funding prisons, and ultimately to end this damn regime. May we be brave and relentless, and may everyone be free.”