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The state now has just four congressional districts considered safe for Republicans, and four seen as competitive. The rest of its 52 members of Congress are all but certain to be Democrats.
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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said Citizens Bank has failed to adequately address its concern about financing private prisons, so the group has withdrawn $1 million from its estimated $14 million account with the bank and threatened to keep removing funds until its demands are met.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, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Businessweek. "Without that money, these corporations literally could not function."
"The idea is to basically use our collective economic power to speak out about those who are aiding and abetting" the immigrant detention system in the United States, adds Cohen. "A lot of what's going on in these ICE detention facilities is not lawful because … immigrant neighbors, most of whom have not committed any crime beyond immigration violations, are being held there without due process."
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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."
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(Second column, 4th story, link)
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