It’s Friday, when we like to bring you something less dark, and today we have a dispatch that is both light and luminous. It’s a David and Goliath tale for the Trumpian age, in which a cohort of a few dozen determined friends take on—and prevail over—the combined forces of ICE and one of the country’s largest banks. I thought that you would enjoy reading it heading into the weekend.
I think the question that I and my colleagues field as much as any other is what is to be done. How can a citizen or band of citizens, with no title, office, or army of lawyers, achieve something concrete in the daily struggle against authoritarianism?
My answer typically runs a few registers, and they are all bona fide. Stay informed. Call out the lies. Stay together and stay engaged, because authoritarian societies bank on isolation and apathy. Be the calm voice at the dining room table and water cooler who keeps explaining that this is an existential moment for the American experiment.
Being part of an independent news community matters as well. Subscriptions to this Substack, and others like it, support and magnify our voices, and in a real way speak truth to power. Trace that to the source, and you’ll find our burgeoning group of subscribers who keep us going.
All are good options. Still, I recognize that people are wondering if there is more they can do, and I’ve been on the lookout for an opportunity to show it. This is that story.
Perhaps you’ve heard of Delaney Hall in Newark, a 1,000-bed ICE detention center. It opened in May 2025. It’s closed nearly entirely to public view, but not so much that we don’t know what goes on inside, and it is hellish: putrid water, filthy toilets, rotten food, and shoddy medical care.
A 41-year-old Haitian immigrant named Jean Wilson Brutus died there last December shortly after he arrived; the government has never clearly explained what happened. It’s one of three deaths at Delaney in the past year that the New York Times reported yesterday “have raised urgent questions about the medical services provided at Delaney Hall and at other detention centers.”
Federal officials asserted in all three deaths that the detainees had received proper care.
Conditions have become so dreadful that in May 2026 the detainees—all of whom are being held for civil, not criminal, proceedings—undertook a hunger strike to bring attention to the human rights abuses.
In conjunction with the hunger strike, Delaney Hall became the scene of regular protests outside the gates. As the protests proliferated, elected officials, including New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, met with the growing crowds. A United States Senator, Andy Kim, who tried to mediate between ICE and the protestors, got pepper sprayed by ICE for his trouble.
Delaney Hall is a private prison run by GEO Group, under a 15-year billion-dollar federal contract. GEO and CoreCivic, which runs other notorious detention centers in Texas and elsewhere, are the two largest private prison operators in the country. Many of its detainees were longtime U.S. residents with jobs and families before ICE snatched them from their communities and detained them incommunicado.
Delaney Hall is a high-profile hellhole, but by no means an outlier in the Trump Administration’s use of abusive private companies.
At least 53 other people have died after being held at detention centers since President Trump took office last year, according to a New York Times analysis. Worse, CNN found that many of the deaths were preventable, connected to inadequate staffing and overpopulation of detainees.
Congressional Democrats documented 85 reports of medical neglect in detention centers across the United States.
Citizens Bank, the 20th largest banking group nationwide with more than $200 billion in assets, is a leading financier for both GEO and CoreCivic. It has provided the two groups more than $2.5 billion in financing, and that number is growing. As recently as this January, Citizens expanded GEO’s borrowing capacity by another $100 million.
Two huge companies with scandalous treatment of civil detainees and one behemoth bank funding the scandalous enterprise. What could be done?
Read on.
Enter Julie Cohen and Paul Barrett, and, as you’ll hear shortly, a pre-existent multi-state coalition of the willing. But I start with Paul and Julie because they’re good friends of mine, and I’m proud of them. My affection, however, has not caused me to embellish the facts, which are well documented.
Julie is an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker—you may know her work on RBG—and Paul is a veteran journalist, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Businessweek, and, good guy that he is, a volunteer at a dog shelter several days a week.
Part of the story is how Julie, Paul, and friends were in position to take action against Delaney Hall, which is near their home in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Along with their neighbor Liz Figenshu, Julie launched “Montclair Sundays,” a grassroots pro-democracy protest group which has held pro-democracy protests for 77 consecutive weeks. That itself is a tangible, and replicable, constructive action.
Their enterprise has grown steadily. There are now 100 or so regulars, with signs, bracelets that read “De-ICE Citizens handmade by Figenshu,” and lots of hoots and hollers to the many honking cars. It’s high-spirited, fun, and highly visible, a classic instance of demonstrators being more than the sum of their parts.
Along with the Montclair mighty, Paul and Julie focused on the connection between the disgraceful goings-on at Delaney Hall and the $2.5 billion funding from Citizens Bank. They went looking for a way to apply pressure to Citizens, based on, as Julie put it, its “complicity with ICE.” The thought was that if the bank pulled its loans, it would be a serious source of pain to GEO and CoreCivic.
So last December Julie and Paul decided to close their own Citizens account. The bank immediately cowered and caved, agreeing to withdraw financing from the private prison operators.
Just kidding. Of course, Citizens didn’t notice the flea on its back, but it was a start. A subsequent op-ed and TV appearance from Julie helped shine a spotlight on the issue.
More individual depositors moved their money. Then churches followed; the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO) pulled first $1 million, then another $2 million of its money from Citizens. It was beginning to be real money but not enough to make Citizens sweat.
From there the enterprise grew in leaps and bounds, taking in scores of protesters, church groups, and eventually, whole municipalities.
Along the way, the Montclair Sundays cadre linked up with groups from New Jersey and around the country, all completely volunteer. Most notably, a group called Montclair Indivisible spearheaded the front-line protests at the local Citizens’ branches. And the national coalition leading this whole thing is called De-ICE Citizens Bank.
As Paul told me, “We were a local branch of a larger multi-state campaign. We jumped on board (or brought our Montclair Sundays chapter on board) once the train was moving.”
The fulcrum move, for which the other smaller gestures laid the groundwork, was getting local government on board. After impassioned and hard-to-rebut presentations from advocates, the Jersey City Council in June voted unanimously to divest and pulled roughly a quarter of a billion dollars out of Citizens.
A month later, Montclair’s council voted unanimously to follow suit, and took its $91.1 million of business to another bank.
Two councils, two unanimous votes, hundreds of millions of dollars walking out the door.
The coalition pushed the cities to do the right—but also the cash-neutral—thing. A municipality has to park its cash somewhere. Move it out of the bank that finances hellish detention centers into one that doesn’t, and you’ve made a moral statement without spending a dime. Several towns actually came out ahead by moving from Citizens. For example, Montclair prequalified eleven other banks, one of which offered a better interest rate than Citizens, so the move was failsafe.
On July 17th, three days after Montclair’s divestment vote, Citizens announced its plans to “wind down its financial relationship” and “exit its current lending relationships” with CoreCivic and GEO.
The bank insists it’s just a coincidence unrelated to the lost money and bad publicity. It issued a public statement calling its decision to withdraw funding from CoreCivic and GEO “a business decision based on changed commercial circumstances.” How likely is it that a $200 billion institution, having watched depositors withdraw hundreds of millions and two city councils vote unanimously to do the same, actually was moved by coincidental and unidentified “changed circumstances.”
I will leave it to the sophisticated readers of this Substack to assess Citizens’ account of its reversal.
Not that the prevarications make a difference. The bottom line remains that the bank ran from its connection to ICE and that billions of dollars that were available to grease the machinery of unconscionable detention have dried up.
I asked Paul and Julie if they thought the effort was quixotic, if not hopeless, when they first put their shoulders to the wheel.
“We thought, going in, that this was a winnable battle,” Julie told me, “Local activism entails a fair amount of drudgery, so we’re always looking to take on campaigns with the potential to yield incremental victories. Building momentum feels really important right now.”
Paul concurred: “I was sanguine that this was a winnable fight, especially once it spread beyond individual withdrawals to the town council chambers. I think I told Julie in early July that I expected Citizens to fold by the end of the summer; it happened sooner.”
So way to go Julie and Paul, and Liz Figenshu. Way to go Montclair Sundays, Montclair Indivisible, and De-ICE Citizens Bank. Way to go GBIO, Andy Kim, and Mikie Sherrill.
Way to go to the many interbraided communities of willing resisters who have linked up and dedicate maybe 1-2 hours a week to stand up against the most corrupt and sinister government of our lifetimes.
Victories such as these matter beyond the financial terms. They create a sort of tailwind to resistance projects large and small. They put a story in the paper and a fact in the air. They let the country at large, as well as the detainees, know that there is strong opposition, and a will to act behind it, to this administration’s inhuman immigration policies.
So here you have an answer to the recurring question: what can we do in the face of authoritarianism? By all means, stay informed; call out the lies; keep the faith around the dinner table; join in communities such as this one. But the wreckage from the Trump policies lies all around us. Find the Delaney Hall and Citizens Bank in your part of the country. Then ready your slingshots.
Talk to you later.
Now THIS gives me hope! Thank you, Harry, for sharing the story, and bravo to Julie & Paul and everyone involved!
Bravo ty for ur dedication to truth and justice