Anti-ICE protests to hit Citizens Bank over ties to prison management companies

After successfully pressing Avelo Airlines to end deportation flights for the federal government, anti-ICE protesters are ramping up pressure on another corporate target: Providence-based Citizens Bank.

Protests are planned at more than 60 Citizens branches on Saturday across more than a dozen states** **including Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Their goal: to decry the bank’s business dealings with prison management companies CoreCivic and GEO Group, which run a number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers.

This is by far the activists’ biggest action against Citizens. They sent their first letter on Tuesday to Citizens Financial Group chief executive Bruce Van Saun, demanding that the company commit to terminating any relationships with CoreCivic and GEO, and to promise not to enter into any new ones. (Van Saun has led the charge for Citizens, whose roots are in New England, to become more of a national bank during the past decade.)

“They’re the most prominent consumer facing bank that is active in this industry,” said John Majercak, a volunteer with the activist group Indivisible Northampton – Swing Left Western Mass. “If we can apply the pressure and get them to stop providing these services to these companies, [while] someone else may finance them, it will increase their costs. It will make it more difficult. It will just slow things down.”

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Majercak said he was among the first to protest Citizens, with a smattering of demonstrations at local branches last fall. The momentum grew into another round of protests in January, at around three-dozen locations.

The extent of the ties between Citizens and the two companies is unclear. GEO, in its annual report in February, said Citizens remains an administrative agent for a revolving credit arrangement with GEO’s lenders that’s committed up to $550 million for the company. CoreCivic’s most recent annual report does not mention Citizens, though as recently as 2024, CoreCivic disclosed an underwriting agreement with a Citizens subsidiary; coalition activists said they are not sure if CoreCivic still has a relationship with Citizens.

Citizens spokesman Rory Sheehan said the bank is aware of the planned protest activity this weekend, but does not comment on specific clients. He provided a statement similar to those he offered in the past when asked about the ICE protests, stating that “we do business with organizations that conduct business in a lawful manner and, if we determine that not to be the case, we are prepared to exit those relationships.”

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The activists are emboldened by Avelo’s recently announced decision to stop running deportation flights for ICE, even though Avelo didn’t cite the protests as the reason for the pullout.

“We’re horrified ... by what ICE is doing both in the streets with its violent campaign of terror and of course once they have collected people and they put them in these detention camps,” Majercak said. “Campaigns like this, it’s targeting Citizens, but it’s also sending very clear messages to other banks or other corporations that would try to profit off of this activity that they’re going to be subject to consumer pressure as well.”

Jon Chesto can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @jonchesto.