My Turn: How I learned to be an activist

I was never a citizen activist. But that all changed with Trump 2.0 and a civil resistance initiative that taught me how peaceful, strategic collective action can succeed.

I jumped in last winter on the De-ICE Citizens Bank campaign, a grassroots effort that forced one of the nation’s largest banks to stop financing ICE prison company giants, CoreCivic and GEO Group. The Rhode Island bank severed its ties with the companies in mid-July after months of protests and other targeted actions across the Eastern U.S.

What made the campaign work and what did I learn?

On the broad activism front, all Americans opposed to the administration’s policies should learn about One Million Rising, a civil resistance effort launched last year by the nonprofit activist group Indivisible. Their toolkit outlines how targeted, sustained citizen action can undermine key pillars of support authoritarian leaders rely on to implement their agendas. By chipping away at corporations that support programs like ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), we can erode and stop those initiatives. 

Citizens Bank is exactly what One Million Rising had in mind — a major bank whose billions of dollars in capital enabled the private prison companies to achieve meteoric growth and profits in lockstep with ICE’s mass incarceration campaign.

So, when a friend approached me in December about a campaign targeting Citizens, I quickly joined. Eight months later, I offer these takeaways on why we won:

Compelling vision: A successful campaign requires a clear, compelling goal that is achievable. Our campaign to get Citizens out of ICE prison lending had that. Citizens Bank was vulnerable because it was the country’s only major bank bankrolling ICE prison companies and it was boosting its lending just as ICE atrocities were exploding across the country. The fact that Citizens is mostly an East Coast bank, anchored primarily in Blue States, was another plus.

Organizing: Successful campaigns require broad support from diverse powerful partners. We had that. We started small: a dozen volunteer activists, mostly from Massachusetts and Connecticut, launched the De-ICE Citizens Bank campaign with a few dozen protests in January. As public anger swelled after two fatal ICE shootings in Minnesota, new partners joined our campaign: first, faith groups, unions and college students; later, politicians, immigrant rights groups and municipalities. By June, we were working with 175 groups in 17 states and holding hundreds of protests.

Open Minds: Successful grassroots campaigns require bottom-up sometimes messy decision-making. It wasn’t always easy, but we accomplished this by opening our minds to differing opinions and tactics. When the Lil’ Rhody Visibility Brigade and Brown University students joined our campaign, they brought other social justice issues into our tent, including LGBTQ and worker rights. When we held a protest day outside Citizen Bank’s annual meeting in Providence, we held teach-ins on these topics. Brown Rise Up students were also more aggressive in confronting Citizens’ board members before the meeting. If their ‘bird-dogging’ was done peacefully and lawfully — two core tenets of our campaign — we had no right to tell them not to do it.

Pivoting: Successful campaigns require quick pivots on tactics and messaging. Citizens Bank’s early stance towards our campaign was to not comment, beyond stating “we do business with organizations that conduct business in a lawful manner.” That gave us an opening. We produced a 20-page report documenting the long trail of lawsuits, fines and other legal actions against CoreCivic and GEO Group over understaffing, poor conditions and medical neglect at their dozens of ICE prisons. Beyond questioning whether these facilities were being run lawfully, the report tarnished the bank’s claims of being community-centered and socially responsible.

Evolve: We learned early on that protests and letters to the CEO would not be enough. Other attention-grabbing tactics were needed to broaden our pressure. We did that. Coalition members raised money for “Dump Citizens Bank” billboards and flyovers, one of them before the MLB All-Star game in Philadelphia. We joined the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization’s “Not with Our Money” campaign, which mobilized $25 million in withdrawal pledges by customers angry over the bank’s ICE prison ties. In June and July, New Jersey municipalities, led by Jersey City, started closing their accounts with Citizens. The millions of dollars in financial bleeding for Citizens was now hundreds of millions.

We’ll likely never know for sure whyCitizens Bank decided in July to “exit” all credit relationships with CoreCivic and GEO Group.

The federal government’s $1.5 billion acquisition of two CoreCivic prisons in California — money that CoreCivic likely used to pay off its credit lines with Citizens — surely had a role.

But so did our campaign.

Hundreds of protests, faith-led rallies, shareholder demands, countless branch visits by angry customers, and withering financial pressure — total withdrawals totaling more than $380 million, with more still happening — created a tsunami of opposition the bank could not ignore.

The lesson is clear: If high-profile companies are supporting and profiting from the deplorable ICE agenda and other Trump policies, everyday Americans can come together to make them pay a price.

Peyton Fleming is an Ashfield resident and Steering Committee member of the De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition.