Tampa, FL: Branch of PNC Bank Disrupted & Call for Continued Pressure on ICE Profiteers

Report on a recent anti-ICE and divestment action against PNC Bank, one of the largest banks that is helping to finance private prisons and detention facilities.

This morning a Tampa PNC branch was entered and disrupted by local abolitionists protesting the corporation’s financial backing of CoreCivic. PNC remains as holdouts who have refused divestment of their one hundred million plus revolving credit and twelve million in loans to CoreCivic, who operate numerous for-profit prisons – lining their pockets through the business of mass incarceration and immigrant detention.

CoreCivic, previously operational as Corrections Corporation of America CCA, is the oldest and largest for-profit prisons corporation in the stolen “United States.” They are well known for the wake of rights abuses and violations they commit against the people they cage for money.

With people across the planet reeling from the cruelties displayed during the acceleration of family separations at the border, CoreCivic lamented to investors on the profit-rich atmosphere around the abduction of refugee child survivors of social disaster seeking asylum at the golden gates, as their stock price soared 14 percent in two weeks during the height of the Trump zero-tolerance policy at the southern border.

During the PNC branch disruption this morning, the bank manager swiftly summoned police while their complicitous relationship to mass incarceration and the caging of asylum-seeking refugees was called out for all employees and incoming bank customers.

One by one, PNC account holders were exposed to the realities of PNC’s business dealings and financial backing of CoreCivic which makes the caging of children, family separations, forced repatriations, medical neglect and death of imprisoned refugees possible.

Their money. Their fault.

This is a call for continued pressure on PNC bank until they divest from CoreCivic and the brutalities of white nationalism and immigration criminalization. Tampa will continue to act in solidarity for the freedom of movement of all people and for the abolition of the rogue, violent and detestable mechanisms of border enforcement; ICE and CBP.