Hi All – Immigration policy & politics are at the core of Trump’s fascist agenda. While his policy and practice of ethnic cleansing has devastated thousands of immigrant families, a great many Americans are pushing back – hard – to sustain due-process rights and human compassion. This has been shown most clearly in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where ICE has been checked and pushed back. Now we have a battlefront in our own neighborhood – in Newark, at the ICE detention center at Delaney Hall. Can ICE be stopped here? Can the Trump people be deterred from attempting to turn NYC into Minneapolis? This weekend we have a chance to push back. Please join the struggle.
The event we are lifting up is the nationwide protest on Saturday outside Citizens Banks. Our local event will take place on Saturday in Yonkers from 12 to 1 pm at Citizens Bank, 2195 Central Park Avenue. The event is sponsored by NYCD16/15 Indivisible, and is co-sponsored by CFOW. Please join us.
Why Citizens Bank? How will this event stop/affect ICE? Good questions. In a nutshell, Citizens Bank is the main funder/money lender for the GEO Group, a huge, private-profit prison industry player, with more than a billion dollars of government/ICE contracts to run “detention centers” such as Delaney Hall in Newark. Saturday’s nationwide protests aim to publicize Citizens Banks role in ICE incarceration, and to urge people to withdraw their money from Citizens Bank to protest ICE policies and practices.
Over the past 2 weeks, the daily news program Democracy Now! has had a half-dozen program segments about the on-going protests at Delaney Hall in Newark. The protests reflect support for a hunger strike and a work strike being conducted by hundreds of people incarcerated in Delaney Hall. Very few of those held prisoner are charged with criminal offenses, and in a great many cases they are accused of immigration offenses without any due process to determine if the accusations are warranted. The daily protests outside Delaney Hall are led by the family members of those detained. In many, many cases the family members describe how their loved-ones’ detention is unfair, and what trauma ICE is causing their family. Here is a program segment from today’s Democracy Now!, describing the protests of last Tuesday:
(Video) Voices from Delaney Hall: Family and Community Members Demand Release of Loved Ones from ICE Jail – June 4, 2026
---- Hundreds of immigrants detained at the ICE jail known as Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, have been on a hunger and labor strike for nearly two weeks. They are protesting the conditions at the jail, including spoiled food that has had maggots in it, overcrowding and inadequate medical care. Detainees are also forced to work for around $1 per day. In retaliation against the strike, guards at Delaney Hall have reportedly beaten participants, and family visitation was temporarily suspended. The strikers are demanding their release from the ICE jail and that the most vulnerable populations are freed first. Detainees’ family members, along with immigration advocates and anti-ICE protesters, have been rallying outside Delaney Hall since the strike began. Democracy Now!’s María Taracena was outside Delaney on Tuesday. She spoke to a detainee who had just been released, a community organizer, a lawyer and family members who were waiting to visit their loved ones inside the ICE jail. [See the Program]
The connection of Citizens Bank to the Delaney Hall detention center, and the importance of citizen action to withdraw money from Citizens Bank to protest ICE policy, is described in this recent segment from Democracy Now!:
(Video) “We Closed Our Account”: Advocates Call for Boycott of Citizens Bank for Financing ICE Jails – June 1, 2026
---- We look at a growing boycott against Citizens Bank amid a campaign to pressure the corporation to divest from financing CoreCivic and GEO Group, two of the nation’s largest private operators of ICE jails. An interfaith coalition of dozens of religious groups in Boston said Citizens Bank has failed to adequately address its concern about financing private prisons, so the group has withdrawn $1 million from its estimated $14 million account with the bank and threatened to keep removing funds until its demands are met. Filmmaker Julie Cohen and journalist Paul Barrett, who are married, recently wrote an opinion piece about closing their account at Citizens Bank over its complicity with Delaney Hall and other ICE jails. “Over more than a dozen years, Citizens Bank has arranged for and helped provide some $2 billion in financing for GEO Group and CoreCivic,” says Barrett. [See the Program]
As mentioned above, the owner of Delaney Hall is The Geo Group, one of two leading private-profit prison profiteers in the US. In addition to tight links between Citizens Bank and The Geo Group, there are also tight links between The GEO Group and ICE. Indeed, an awareness of these links enables us to see the USA Prison-Immigrant Complex that is at the core of Operations for the Trump regimes ethnic-cleansing assaults on immigrants. The following segment from Democracy Now! Helps us close the circle between Citizens Bank, the private-prison complex, and ICE:
(Video) “Revolving Door”: Former GEO Group VP David Venturella Is New Interim ICE Chief
---- President Donald Trump has tapped David Venturella, a former ICE official and executive at the private prison company GEO Group, to replace Todd Lyons as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. GEO Group saw its profits jump from $32 million in 2024 to more than $254 million in 2025 as the Trump administration expanded government contracts with ICE jails nationwide. Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, says private prison companies have an “intricate” relationship with ICE. “It’s really a revolving door,” she says, pointing out that Venturella worked for ICE under Presidents Bush and Obama, then went to GEO Group before this latest appointment by President Trump. “It’s really hard to see where the interests of ICE end and those of private prison companies begin,” says Ghandehari. [See the Program]
This story will continue and may blow up to make Newark another Minneapolis. We know from recent history that citizen resistance to fascism works, and we also know that the Trump people have another 2+ years in power and will keep pressing to achieve their evil schemes. Please join us on Saturday and be aware of the next chapters in ICE-GEO-Citizens Bank.
BELOW there are some additional links to video and reading about Citizens Bank and the Prison-Incarceration Complex, for those wishing to dive deeper into this mess.
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
SOME ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Curfew to Be Lifted Near Detention Center Where Protests Have Raged
By Ashley Southall, New York Times [June 2, 2026]
---- The Newark Police Department said that 61 people had been arrested between Sunday and Monday on charges of failure to disperse, curfew violation and resisting arrest. Officials did not identify them and said no other information was available. Mr. Baraka said that the state officials were handing greater control to the city after the state police failed to cool tensions between the demonstrators and federal immigration enforcement officers. He said that the city planned to remove protest zones that had limited demonstrators’ movements and would lean on street teams largely made up of clergy and community activists to keep the peace. The shift follows mounting criticism of the decision by Gov. Mikie Sherrill to give control to the state police on Friday in response to the Trump administration’s threat to send in a surge of immigration enforcement officers. Mr. Baraka said that the state police used tactics that only made matters worse as the protests grew during the weekend. [Read More]
(Video) NJ State Police Join Crackdown Against Supporters of Hunger-Striking Immigrants at Delaney Hall – June 1, 2026
---- An estimated 300 immigrants detained at the Delaney Hall ICE jail in Newark, New Jersey, are continuing a hunger and labor strike to demand their freedom. Amid ongoing protests, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill has deployed state police, who erected a barricade around the facility and have reportedly brutalized activists. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka has also imposed a nightly curfew around Delaney Hall until further notice. Local investigative journalist Bob Hennelly joins Democracy Now! to talk about the ongoing hunger and labor strike, launched on May 22, and its historical implications in Newark and the rest of the country. In letters at the outset of their strike detailing the conditions in the ICE jail, detainees have “written something that I think historians will say is equivalent to the Declaration of Independence,” says Hennelly, “because they so vividly describe the way they’ve been deprived of all the basic human rights that we’ve come to associate with this nation.” [See the Program]
(Video) “They Are Not Alone Inside”: Protests Outside Newark ICE Jail Support Hunger-Striking Detainees – May 27, 2026
---- Around 300 immigrants detained at the Delaney Hall ICE jail in Newark, New Jersey, have been on a hunger and work strike since Friday to protest inhumane conditions and due process violations. Delaney Hall is operated by the private prison company GEO Group. Since the hunger strike was launched, immigration advocates have been staging a solidarity protest outside Delaney Hall to promote the detainees’ demands for freedom. Protesters and ICE agents have clashed outside the jail, and three people have been arrested. Tensions escalated on Sunday when ICE removed a hunger strike organizer, Martín Soto, prompting protesters outside the ICE jail to block a van being used to transport him. Masked ICE agents responded by firing tear gas and pushing people to the ground. Soto was ultimately transferred to an ICE jail in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and is now facing criminal charges for allegedly assaulting an ICE officer. … Gabriela Soto says that she started the protest in conjunction with the detainees’ strike so that the media could see how ICE is “destroying families and separating them.” Soto says that when she was blocked from seeing her husband during visiting hours on Saturday, a guard asked her why she was “spreading lies” and talking to the press. “He said, ‘Why are you telling people that we’re feeding them worms? Why are you telling people that we don’t give them medical care?’ I said, ‘Because it’s true.’” [See the Program]
