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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to news that Citizens Bank has severed financial ties to CoreCivic and the GEO Group, two of the nation’s largest private prison operators that work directly with ICE to run immigration jails. The national bank has faced significant pushback from social justice groups and activists for providing more than $2.5 billion in financing to the two private prison companies.

Earlier this month, Citizens Bank said it was ending its lending relationships with the GEO Group and CoreCivic, insisting that the move was a, quote, “business decision based on changed commercial circumstances” and unrelated to protest actions and the growing boycott of Citizens Bank.

Three days before Citizens decided to end its financial relationship with the GEO Group and CoreCivic, the township of Montclair, New Jersey, voted to pull its $91 million account from Citizens Bank. This is Montclair Mayor Renee Baskerville speaking in favor of divesting from Citizens Bank at a Montclair Township Council meeting earlier this month.

MAYOR RENEE BASKERVILLE: It’s not just a one-out. It’s like a wake-up call, that I think that we need to be more diligent about who we’re doing business with, who we’re investing with, what contracts we’re giving out. And really, you know, when we’re doing these things, maybe we should be just a little bit more aware and take a look at the behind-the-scenes types of things. And even when we were talking about, you know, well, what next? You take it from Citizens. And I’m saying, well, let’s make sure that we know, wherever we go, whether it’s Valley, Bank of America, whoever it may be, that we know who, you know, they’re doing banking with, because there’s a lot of other categories, none as urgent as — this is immediately in this setting here and now, with what’s going on at Delaney.

AMY GOODMAN: Montclair’s decision follows a decision last month by Jersey City in New Jersey to divest from Citizens Bank and close its over $250 million account. The GEO Group runs the Delaney Hall federal immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, and CoreCivic operates the Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. Reverend John Edgerton is the senior minister of Old South Church in Boston and board member of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, which has withdrawn $3 million from Citizens Bank over its concerns with the bank’s relationship with CoreCivic and GEO. And joining us here in New York is Jake Ephros, a Jersey City councilmember who helped lead the effort to close Jersey City’s $250 million Citizens Bank account.

Jake, let’s begin with you, Councilmember. Talk about how this happened. This is happening all over the country, but kind of piecemeal in a way that people don’t realize how much pressure has been brought on Citizens Bank, whether or not they admit that this has led to their decision.

JAKE EPHROS: Yeah, it really is pressure. And just first, thank you so much for having me on the show. It’s really an honor to be here.

Before I was on Jersey City Council, I got my start as a Democratic Socialists of America member, organizing the Abolish ICE movement, fighting against ICE detention centers and jails in New Jersey, and just at the beginning of this year was elected for this first term as a city councilmember in Jersey City.

And the pressure at Delaney Hall was growing. The conditions were deteriorating. And the resistance on the inside, led by detainees, was escalating, particularly by hunger strikers and labor strikers. And Delaney Hall in Newark includes residents of Jersey City, so this was, of course, a concern of my constituents, being there.

And it just so happened that the De-ICE Citizens Bank movement, these amazing activists who are identifying just how much financing of GEO Group, which operates Delaney, as you mentioned, and of CoreCivic — just how much financing Citizens Bank does. $2.5 billion, I think, was the amount of financing going to these companies. De-ICE Citizens Bank was doing this great work. I had just started hearing about it maybe days or a week before a City Council meeting, where I was reviewing the agenda the week before the City Council meeting, and I noticed that we had a vote to authorize where our money, essentially, was being held in different banks. And I saw that Citizens Bank was on this list, and that raised alarms for me right away.

So, it was absolutely thanks to the incredible work of the activists with the De-ICE Citizens Bank movement that I would even know to look out for that. And I immediately told the administration. I worked with my other DSA counterpart, Councilman Joel Brooks, on our City Council. And we demanded the full divestment of the $200-plus million that we had in Citizens Bank. And we put forward a resolution that was unanimously voted on by our City Council. And to their credit, the administration, under Mayor Solomon, they acted immediately and made that divestment happen.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Citizens Bank is the 17th- or 18th-largest bank in the U.S. Have you heard any responses from people who have accounts at Citizens Bank? And were any of them among the activists who pushed for this decision?

JAKE EPHROS: There were some concerns that I heard on the ground here and there from people who might have accounts. We are not served enough in Jersey City by banks, and there’s not enough banking, especially in the south side of Jersey City, and there are a couple branches of Citizens Bank there. But it was incredibly important, and I think there was an overwhelming consensus that those questions need to be tackled on their own, and we need to tackle this, like, serious moral, political and material concern of having $200-plus million in Citizens Bank.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, recently we had Julie Cohen and Paul Barrett in the studio. They privately had a Citizens Bank account. Paul Barrett, who worked for The Wall Street Journal and other places. Julie Cohen is the Oscar-nominated filmmaker who made RBG. Earlier this year, she and Paul Barrett wrote an op-ed for NJ.com about their decision to close their accounts over the bank’s complicity with Delaney Hall. We want to go to a clip of Julie speaking at Bloomfield, New Jersey Town Council earlier this month.

JULIE COHEN: I think it’s important to be really clear that this is about Citizens’ complicity with ICE. My husband and I actually closed our own accounts at the Citizens branch on Broad Street in December after we learned that Citizens was providing financing for GEO Group and CoreCivic, the private prison companies that are behind the now-notorious ICE detention at Delaney Hall, at Dilley in Texas, where there are, you know, parents and children together in a center where there are zero criminals, at Elizabeth detention and a lot of places where there are — there’s a lack of due process and where there are all kinds of human rights violations. We didn’t want our own money going to that, and we certainly don’t want our tax dollars in bank accounts that are associated with ICE and that really enable some of ICE’s worst behavior.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Julie Cohen, who, together with her husband Paul Barrett, pulled out their accounts from Citizens Bank.

We’re joined in Boston by Reverend John Edgerton, senior minister of the Old South Church in Boston, board member of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, which has withdrawn $3 million from Citizens Bank. If you can, Reverend, talk about your decision? And, I mean, we’re talking about cities. Now we’re talking about churches. What was the decision of the church? And did Citizens Bank respond?

REV. JOHN EDGERTON: So, we’ve been involved in this with our sister organization, Greater Cleveland Congregations, with the De-ICE coalition, which is an all-volunteer, grassroots-led organization, for many months. We attended the annual shareholders’ meeting in Rhode Island and informed the board, informed the — informed the CEO, Bruce Van Saun, in the wintertime of concerns about this. We asked for a meeting to discuss this, and they never actually made that meeting happen.

And so, we told them, “If you won’t meet with us, won’t discuss our concerns, then we will withdraw a million dollars on this date.” And we did so, and they didn’t reply. And we then withdrew $2 million from that. And then, of course, when Jersey City and Montclair withdrew $356 million — municipalities just have more zeros at the end of their bank accounts than churches do — and so, this was really a broad movement. And the pressure became too much for Citizens to bear, and they had to do the right thing.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And so, Reverend Edgerton, do you hope that other churches follow suit? And is there any indication? Have you heard anything about how that may happen, taking your example?

REV. JOHN EDGERTON: So, this became really quite a broad movement very quickly. We originally had about $13 million that were organized, of people who said that they would be willing to withdraw their money. That quickly grew to $24 million. And those organizations still have those deposits pledged. And so, we’re going to be watching to make sure that Citizens follows through with what they’ve said that they’re going to do, that they will in fact cut ties completely and quickly with CoreCivic and GEO Group. We want to verify that they have — that they have done that. And there is plenty of public pressure to make that happen.

AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Edgerton, Citizens Bank said, quote, “Citizens has been disappointed that the activists have dragged it into what is largely a political matter.” If you can respond to that? And also, did Citizens’ CEO say he would meet with you? And did he?

REV. JOHN EDGERTON: So, CEO Bruce Van Saun committed at their annual shareholder meeting to meet with Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, said that he would make it happen within two weeks. That didn’t occur. And then, later on, they sent us a letter saying that they were reneging on that promise to meet with us, because we were making false and misleading statements. They didn’t let us know what exactly we had said that was wrong. We stand by the things that we have said. We would very much like to meet still with CEO Bruce Van Saun. There has been a lot of reputational damage done to the bank, that we bank with. And we can give them some good advice about how to rebuild that trust.

This is a situation that has become terrible for Citizens Bank because of their own decisions. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place, on the one hand, of a public that realizes that what they’re doing is unconscionable, and does not want to bank with such an entity, and a regulatory structure which is vindictive and would punish them if they were seen to go against the administration. That is because of Citizens Bank own choices to put themselves into that position. Nobody forced them to get involved in the private prison business. In 2021, almost every big bank got out of that dirty business. Citizens stayed in it. They shouldn’t have. And now they need to repair their reputation with the people of this country.

AMY GOODMAN: Reverend John Edgerton, senior minister of Old South Church in Boston, board member of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, which has withdrawn $3 million from Citizens Bank. And Jake Ephros, a Jersey City councilmember, who helped lead the effort to close Jersey City’s $250 million Citizens Bank account.

Coming up, we go to Springfield, Ohio, as ICE is reportedly stepping up plans to arrest and deport Haitians across the country. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians lost their TPS status this week. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Way of Life” by T-Rosemond in our Democracy Now! studio.