Democracy Now! Audio - Democracy Now! 2026-07-30 Thursday

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

Democracy Now! Thursday, July 30, 2026

From New York, this is Democracy Now. Whoever wins with AI is going to win. That's how big it is. So it's bigger than the Internet ever was. It's bigger than anything ever was. So I don't want to restrict. I know many of these people. I don't want to restrict them from doing great work.

President Trump says he doesn't want to restrict the AI industry, despite growing concerns that the latest artificial intelligence models can evade and resist human rights. oversight, rogue AI agents run by Open AI, secretly hacked into other companies during what was supposed to be a controlled test. We'll speak to MIT professor Max Tegmark of the Future of Life Institute. Then Citizens Bank has severed financial ties with Core Civic and the Geo Group, two of the nation's largest private for-profit operators of ICE jails. We'll look at the grassroots movement around the country pushing for divestment. Citizens Bank announced that they are

cutting off credit to CoreC Civic and Geo Group. This is because of grassroots organizing. This is because of municipal organizing from Montclair, from Jersey City. This is because of local democracy working, standing up against a runaway administration. And we go to Springfield, Ohio, as ICE is reportedly stepping up plans to arrest and deport Haitian migrants across the country after hundreds of thousands of Haitians lost their protections under TPS, the temporary protected status program this week. All that and more coming up. Welcome to Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman.

The Pentagon said it struck dozens of Islamic Revolutionary Guard targets inside Iran, including military command centers and drone facilities and retaliation for Iran targeting U.S. bases in Jordan. According to Iranian state media, a couple and their two-year-old child were killed in U.S. strikes on Keshem Island. The U.S. also issued another round of sanctions on Iran, designating 10 entities and eight tankers. This comes as the war threatens to spread throughout the region. Jordan said it intercepted an Iranian missile attack. In Egypt, a drone hit a U.S. own gas storage tanker at the Mediterranean port of Damieta on Wednesday. In Iraq, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia launched strikes on what they're claiming are.

Iranian-backed militia groups Wednesday. Funerals were held for the fighters of the popular mobilization forces killed in the strikes. The Iraqi president condemned the air raids, calling it a, quote, blatant violation of Iraq's sovereignty targeting its official institutions, unquote. This is Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesperson for the U.N. Secretary General. Well, the one thing we don't want to see is, again, is any expansion of the conflict. So having more parties involved in the fighting, having the fighting spread to a larger number of countries, all of these are adverse developments and could get us into a much worse situation even than before. Here in New York City, dozens of people attended an anti-war rally Wednesday demanding an immediate ceasefire in Iran. The demonstration was organized by Pai, NYC, a group of Iranian-NYC, a group of Iranian-N-Wenstein.

diaspora members founded in April to reject U.S. military aggression against Iran. This is Nahid Siamdust, a professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. I'm an Iranian American who is working hard and paying my taxes and seeing that money going into Iran to killing my own family. We're asking that these wars stop. Some Iranians in the West have been sold a lie. They have been sold the lie that the U.S. and Israel are going to be bringing them some kind of salvation or freedom. We know that that was never the intention because, you know, within a couple of weeks, Donald Trump, of course, threatened to annihilate Iran's entire civilization. In Libya, demonstrators stormed an energy complex near Tripoli and closed gas lines to protest ongoing power outages across the country.

Anti-government protests have been ongoing for days as demonstrators demand the resignation of the prime minister. Libya is split into rival eastern and western governments, each backed by militias and foreign powers since a NATO-backed uprising killed dictator Malmar Gaddafi in 2011. The United Nations is warning Israeli settler violence and the occupied West Bank has hit an all-time high. Eighteen Palestinians have been killed in settler attacks so far this year, compared with 17 in all of last year. This comes after the Israeli Security Cabinet earlier this year. approved over $430 million to establish 34 new settlements in the occupied West Bank.

In Gaza, Israel continues to move its so-called yellow line of control further into the strip. Residents in Daryl Balach, Kanyunas, Gaza City, and northern Rafa, report having to evacuate from their homes to abide by Israel's shifting zone of occupation. Israel currently controls an estimated 64 percent of the Gaza Strip. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to expand the area under Israel's control to 70% of Gaza. This is a Palestinian woman whose family was displaced. Every day they advance more. We settle.

They advance again. I was on that line. They advanced three times. They advanced on us here as well. From where should we leave? We are besieged from this side and the other side. Does this work? It doesn't work.

Please, everyone, make us comfortable. Find a solution for us. News is reporting. Trump's former campaign manager, Brad Parzcal, has been quietly working with Israel to help influence how artificial intelligence chatbots talk about Gaza. Israel awarded Pascal's form a $46.5 million contract for the project, which involves creating websites and blog posts about Israel. The target audience for the sites is AI chatbots like Clawful. and chat GPT. When DropSight asked one chatbot, whether it would be beneficial for the United States to enhance military cooperation with Israel, the chatbot responded with a one-word answer.

Yes. The top source cited was a website created by Pascal's firm for the Israeli government. In Ukraine, Russia launched more than 70 missiles and about 280 drones killing eight people overnight. Poland had to scramble jets to secure its airspace during the attack. It comes as Ukraine claimed to hit major Russian oil refineries after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's meeting with President Trump at the White House. The UN is sounding the alarm about a growing hunger crisis in eastern Congo that is exacerbated by the Ebola outbreak. In the DRC, the ongoing Ebola outbreak has recorded over 3,300 confirmed cases, including more than 1,400 deaths. According to the UN senior Ebola coordinator, 50 people died of Ebola just in the last 24 hours.

This is the acting director of the World Food Program. Some 10 million people, I mean 10 million people, that's the population of Sweden, the country I come from, are acutely food insecure in the Eastern DRC. And 3 million of those are in IPC4, as you know, emergency level of food insecurity. That is one step away from famine. That means they go to bed every night, hungry. They wake up hungry every morning.

Pakistan authorities stand accused of killing 30 people in Pakistan, administered Kashmir. After security forces fired on tens of thousands of peaceful protesters earlier this week, protests have erupted in Pakistani Kashmir, calling for electoral reform. The government responded by shutting down, in the region in the capital Islamabad, students protested against the government's actions. Our protest is aimed at stopping what we say is the oppression of Muslims that has been taking place for the past two months in Rawalakot and across Kashmir. We have gathered here to urge the government to allow students to play their role in addressing the situation. We also protest against the rhetoric used by federal ministers, as we believe their language.

is worsening the situation. The Federal Reserve voted to maintain the current interest rate at around 3.6%. Three officials dissented and voted to raise the interest rate. President Trump's repeatedly pressured the Fed to lower rates despite persistently high inflation for more than five years. On Capitol Hill, a critical vote on Todd Blanche's nomination to be Attorney General has been postponed. Republican senators John Cornyn of Pennsylvania.

Texas and Tom Tillis of North Carolina have threatened to withhold their support for Blanche if he does not provide written limits on the controversial settlement reach between Trump and the IRS over Trump's unprecedented lawsuit against the agency. Cornyn and Tillis are seeking written assurances that the Justice Department will not create a $1.776 billion dollar fund for Trump's allies, including January 6 rioters. The senators also want to scale back the part of the settlement that exempted Trump and his family from IRS audits before joining the Justice Department Blanche served as Trump's personal attorney. On Wednesday, a group of Jeffrey Epstein survivors lobbied senators to vote against Blanche saying he was, quote, very condescending to them during their meeting earlier this month. The U.S. Senate has unanimously passed a resolution opposing a pardon for Epstein's long-time associate,

Gilein Maxwell, who's currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking crimes. The resolution introduced by Democratic Senator Jackie Rosen of Devada says, quote, Maxwell should not be granted a presidential pardon or any form of clemency for her crimes with Jeffrey Epstein relating to the sexual exploitation and abuse. of minors, she said. President Trump has asked the Supreme Court to overturn an $83.3 million jury award against him for defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. Carol filed the defamation suit over remarks Trump made while president. Earlier this month, the federal judge ruled Trump must pay E. Jean Carroll, $5.8 million in connection with a separate Carroll lawsuit against Trump. In that case,

a jury found that Trump had sexually abused and defamed her. She has received the more than $5 million in that case. Republican Congress member Max Miller of Ohio is facing allegations of domestic abuse as he runs for re-election. His ex-wife, Emily Moreno, who is the daughter of the sitting Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno, claims Congressmember Miller burned her chest and stomach by throwing hot water at her, held a gun to her head and fractured their two-year-old daughter's collarbone. Miller's also facing a defamation lawsuit from former Trump spokesperson Stephanie Grishman, Grisham, who alleges that he abused her as well during their relationship before he married Moreno.

This comes as Democratic Congress member Rokana and Republican Congress member Anna Polina Luna recently introduced a bill barring federal elected officials from using campaign funds to settle sexual misconduct allegations. Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chaired by Senator Rand Paul. During the combative hearing, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times declining to answer questions about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the origins of the coronavirus. During the hearing, Dr. Fauci decried what he called, Senator Paul's, quote, unhinged obsession with me, unquote. Given Senator Paul's obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated, slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything that could vindicate

his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote. After the hearing, Senator Paul announced the committee would vote on whether to hold Fauci in contempt. President Biden, before he left office, issued Dr. Fauci a preemptive pardon, believing that his opponents would go after him. after President Biden left office. And those are some of the headlines. This is Democracy Now, DemocracyNow.org, the Warren Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. And I'm Nirmine Sheikh.

Welcome to our listeners and views across the country and around the world. Open AI CEO, Sam Altman, is in Washington, D.C., meeting with lawmakers as concern grows over the power of the latest artificial intelligence models to evade or resist human oversight. Altman's trip to Capitol Hill comes just days after OpenAI admitted some of its experimental AI agents went rogue and secretly hacked into the infrastructure of another AI company called Hugging Face during what was supposed to be a controlled test. Open AI has now disclosed that several other companies were also hacked. President Trump was questioned Wednesday about the hack and calls to increase regulations on AI firms. When we're looking at AI, we're looking at controls, we're also making sure that we lead.

So we're leading China in AI by a lot. China has virtually no controls. It's freewheeling a little bit. So we have to be careful in both ways. We don't want to restrict them. We're all of a sudden, we come in second to China. Whoever wins with AI is going to win. That's how big it is.

So it's bigger than the Internet ever was. It's bigger than anything ever was. So I don't want to restrict. I know many of these people. I don't want to restrict them from doing great work. In related news, over 1,100 scientists and senior employees at top AI firms have called on the U.S. government to back international efforts to develop tools that can, quote, deliberately pace the development of the world's most advanced AI systems. Signatories to the letter include senior employees at Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Open AI. The signers wrote, quote, to realize AI's potential industry, government, and society,

at large may need the option to buy time to address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight. We're joined now by Max Tegmark, Professor conducting AI and physics research at MIT as part of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, as well as at the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines. He's also co-founder of Future of Light, Institute, which advocates for the positive use of AI. He's the author of the New York Times bestseller, Life 3.0, being human in the age of artificial intelligence. Well, we certainly want to ask you about how to be human in the age of artificial intelligence, but first, Professor Tegmark, let's begin with you explaining to a lay global audience. What it means that this open AI

rogue agent or agents broke out and autonomously attacked other companies' programs? What exactly does this mean? So what this means exactly is that those passive chatbots that just sit there and answered questions, that's so yesterday. What we're talking about now are AI systems. that also have goals on their own, that they can actively go out and pursue in the world. This agent that Open AI had launched internally, it spent four and a half days trying, trying, trying to accomplish this task. And eventually it figured out that the best way it could do it was if it first hacked its way out of Open AI onto the open Internet. and then it figured out how to hack itself into four other entities, including this company Hugging Face,

where it managed to commandeer several different computer clusters and get top-level access to all sorts of things in there and steal a bunch of data from Hugging Face. And that means that we should no longer think of today's cutting AJI, again, it's just the chatbots that everyone is familiar with. but really as an alien type of being that can have goals of its own and go out of the world and pursue them. And this incident of itself, of course, didn't cause any enormous harm. So we should think of it as a canary in the coal mine.

Because if you listen to what these companies are actually saying that they ultimately want to do, it's to build so-called superintelligence, which are machines that can accomplish any, any tasks way, way better than humans. And they also want to give them robotic bodies eventually. So Sam Olten, the CEO of Open AI, has written on a blog that the humans are going to be the first species to create their own successor to build a new robotic species, which can outsmart us in every way. And you played our president here talking about how whoever gets the super powerful AI first

will win. Just speaking from my expertise as a scientist, an AI researcher, it's pretty obvious that if we race to this, then whoever builds something like that first will lose and take the rest of the world with them. Because, you know, if you walk down to the local zoo and you ask yourself which species is in the cages and which one is in charge, right? It's not the humans in the cages because it tends to be the smarter species that dominates. And this is why these AI researchers from all these competing companies wrote this letter you just mentioned, saying, oh, hold your horses here.

Maybe we should at least build some brakes. So if we need to slow down a little bit, we can. So, Professor Tegmark, if you could explain the difference between artificial general intelligence and whether you think that's already happened. and what kind of regulations you think would prevent super intelligence from beginning, you know, starting to be what you've warned against. You've said, in fact, that AI is the only industry in the U.S. that's less regulated than sandwiches. Yeah. So, of course, we've long had machines that have very narrow intelligence. You know, my pocket calculator I had when I was 10 years old was.

much better at multiplying numbers than I'll ever be. And we have AI tools that are very good at translating between English and Japanese and still can't even can't drive a car properly, etc. Artificial General Intelligence is simply AI that can do everything as well as a well-educated human. We don't have it yet with some colleagues. I was recently a co-author on a paper where we found that Chachi P.T. was was

4 yeah GPT 4 was 27% of the way there the latest the JCP 5 was 57% of there but the company is mostly

their leadership mostly predicts that we'll get there maybe this year maybe next year maybe in two years something it won't happen for five years but once that happens we're at this crazy inflection point with AI

is better than anyone, any humans at the company is at making still better AI. You know, so chat GPT7 would create chat GPT8, which would create chat CPT9 and so on at a crazy rapid pace. And then when you give these things robotic bodies, you know, it's pretty obvious that if you have millions or billions of smarter than human robots running around the planet doing all sorts of things that we don't even understand, we might lose control over what's happening here on Earth. So Professor Tegmark, with respect to these robotic bodies, where are they already operating? We believe in China, certainly, despite the fact that China has much fewer data centers,

the U.S. has something like 10 to 12 times more. What do you think is the future for robotic bodies And what kind of work do you imagine they'll eventually do? And are they effectively inevitable? When you go to San Francisco, we already have AI-controlled robots driving around in the form of Waymo self-driving cars, right? We shouldn't just think of robots with two arms and two legs. And, you know, Tesla and many other companies in America and China

are working very hard to make robots cheaper. and very ubiquitous. The reason people want to put two arms and two legs on robots is, of course, because only then can you replace all human workers, since our infrastructure is very much built for workers with two arms and two legs. That's where you can take the biggest profits by basically replacing getting all the money they went to workers and paying it to the owners of these machines. But I think it's a mistake to ask what will happen, because that's, makes us seem so weak. Like we are just some passive bystanders, you know,

eating popcorn and waiting to see what future is going to happen to us. And we are creating this future, right? So we should ask ourselves what we want to happen. And I'm so glad you brought up the sandwich thing, you know. If we wanted people in New York to worry about getting salmonella every time they go to a restaurant, then we would get rid of the food inspectors. But we've chosen as a society to steer. the development in the better direction.

So if I move to New York and decide to open a sandwich shop, you know, when the health inspector comes and says, you know, Hey, Max, I found 18 rats in your kitchen. You're not selling any sandwiches. Then I could turn around to this person from the government to say, you know, don't tell anyone. I'm not going to sell any sandwiches. I'm just going to release an AI girlfriend product for 11-year-old kids,

and I'm going to release an AI that can make bio-weapons for, terrorists and I'm going to release these super intelligent robots that I don't know how to control. The poor person from the government would be forced to say, okay, Max, that's all legal. You go ahead and do that. But just don't sell any sandwiches, right?

That's how we're messed up. The current situation is. And the good news is that because it's so ridiculous, there's a rapidly growing coalition across the political spectrum all the way from Bernie

standards, the people like Steve Bannon, saying this is nuts. We need to treat AI companies like we would treat any other powerful companies saying, hey, we have these safety standards for sandwiches, for cars, for medicines, you can't release products until they met the standards. That way, we would get a race to the top where companies can focus on curing cancer and other things instead of this absolutely insane, in my opinion, race to replace humans, not just as girlfriends and therapists and workers, but ultimately even in the big decisions that are being made about our future. So Professor Tegmark, as we see, for example, Sam Altman going from senator to senator's

office, you know, after dealing with his rogue agent that got loose and who knows what it attacked. You also have this 1100 scientists and senior employees at top AI forms calling on the U.S. government to back international efforts to develop tools that could, quote, deliberately pace the development of the world's most advanced AI systems. We played the clip of Trump in the lead saying we can't regulate them because then that would put us behind China. if you can again explain in late terms, I mean, you're talking about a group of senators and congress members, many of them quite old, not experienced in this at all. What needs to be regulated?

We know that the leaders of these companies are trying to say we will regulate ourselves. But what do you think are the most important areas to regulate? Well, as soon as we start treating AI companies like we treat pharma companies and restaurants, then they will not be able to release their new systems at all before they've demonstrated that they don't cause kids to commit suicide or do all these other harms. And then the companies themselves will put in a massive effort into making their things safer and they will not go into these crazy things. So it's very easy.

We've done this as a society before. used to be companies selling thalidomide that would make babies be born with our arms and legs when that industry was regulated. We fixed it. We can fix the AI the same way. About China, you know, the dirty little secret that these AI lobbyists don't mention is that the Chinese government really likes to be in control and will never tolerate the Chinese company making a new species that's going to overthrow.

the Chinese government, obviously. So this is very much a red herring. In fact, China has already cracked down harder on its companies than America has on our companies. They crack down hard on AI girlfriends and other anthropomorphic AI just weeks ago. They have a law saying that any AI generated content has to be labeled, et cetera, et cetera. So I feel that this is more of a talking point among the lobbyists. And as soon as there's any real political will to regulate AI, it'll be quite easy to come up with agreements with China.

We should remember that, you know, there's very little trust right now between the U.S. and China, but there wasn't a whole lot of trust either between Leonid Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter, right? And that did not prevent these two nations from making a lot of deals regarding nuclear weapons because they had a shared incentive to not have a nuclear war. And America and China have a shared incentive to not, for it to be humans who win, not to have a future with a bunch of psychopath robots running the show. Well, Professor Tegmark, I'd like to turn to the words of someone who is widely referred to as the godfather of AI,

Jeffrey Hinton, who said in a recent interview with the big technology podcast that AI is coming up with new forms of intelligence, exceeding that of humans. A chatbot had come up with an interesting mathematical proof of one of the Erdos's conjectures that impressed mathematicians. It was original. It wasn't just searching the literature, and that's the thin end of a wedge. I believe, for example, in areas like mathematics, because it's a closed system, you don't need data, you can just make conjectures and see if you can prove them and keep on like that. In that sense, it's a bit like AlphaGo

where you can play against yourself. I think it's going to get very smart fairly quickly. Within the next 10 or 20 years, it may even be producing novel math that people can't understand. So, Professor Tegmar, if you could talk about this, this so-called what's referred to

as recursive intelligence, and then tell us what you found in your recent, the report card, wherein artificial intelligence experts, rated leading AI companies on key safety and security domains. It seems from your results that none of the nine did especially well. Yeah, that's right. As a professor, those are not the kind of grades I would like my students to get.

The term recursive self-improvement simply refers to an AI that is so smart that it can improve itself. So today, when you go from chat GPT4 to chat CP5, there were a lot of humans involved in that work, right? Recuracy self-improvement is when chatypte 7, you know, can just press a button and come back later and now it's created chat GPT8. That's kind of basically digital gain of function research, where before along we might be as much, the AI might be as much smarter than us as we are smarter than,

mice or snails. And it was very interesting. I read almost all the comments that the signatories of those thousands plus signatories from the competing companies had signed that you mentioned. And it's really quite gripping to see how so many of the workers these companies are really terrified. It just shines through in what they've written. Many of them write that they think we're two years away from just really losing control

of this. And I think the reason that's lost on the broader public and our politicians is because, you know, we all noticed four years ago that computers went from not being able to talk to being able to talk. But much fewer people have noticed that since then, AI went from kind of high school level to college level, to professor level, to Nobel laureate level and beyond in certain areas. winning now winning the gold medal in the international mathematics Olympiad, approving new mathematical theorems and so on. And it's getting particularly good at writing programs, which is exactly why you see these companies betting so hard on having their AI replace their own workers and improve itself.

There has to be a red line that nobody is allowed to do recursive self-improvement. This is not something that... Yeah. Professor Tegmark, if I could just... ask, with respect to what you're referring to, the sheer speed at which AI has developed, which seems to have stunned even its pioneers. I mean, it was 10 years ago that artificial intelligence beat the game Go, a 5,500-year-old game, by what's referred to as Move 37. If you could talk about the significance of that and what you think accounts for both the scale

and the rapidity with which AI is developing and expanding. Yeah, the significance of that go game against Lisa Dahl was that that kind of put the nail in the coffin for a lot of people in this notion that AI can never be creative, that there's some things that human intelligence only can do. And the reason that things have gone so crazy fast is, you know, if you and I had the ability to just press a button and now our brain would be 10 times bigger,

and then it would be 100 times bigger and a thousand times bigger, and if we could read the whole internet and every book ever written and remember it all, you know, of course we could be much more intelligent. But we have these physical limits to our bodies. Whereas with machines, it's not like that. If you can't fit enough computational power in your laptop, well, take a data center the size of an aircraft hanger

and fill it up with machines and put in a gigawatt of power and give it everything ever written to learn from. Professor Tegmark, I wanted to end by asking you a question, a response to a response. Sam Altman said, were deploying responsibly developed AI to liberate humanity for menial labor and usher in an era of unparalleled creativity and abundance. To which the great author and activist Naomi Klein responded, you ingested the entire written output of human civilization without consent, without compensation, without credit to build a system

whose primary commercial application is eliminating the jobs of the people whose work you consumed. you're not liberating human creativity. You're strip mining it and selling it back at a markup while calling the theft training data. We have 30 seconds, Max Tegmark. Not only do I agree with that, which is a great case study of what happens when you leave an industry completely unregulated.

But, you know, I was just playing with my three-year-old son this morning. And when he says liberate, what he's actually saying is going to liberate my son from the ability to ever get a job. is going to liberate him from having agency by making, it's completely making my son economically obsolete and everybody else on this planet. And this is something I believe,

you're called democracy now for a reason, should be decided democratically, not by some dudes who've had too much red bull to drink and haven't been elected. Max Tegmark, we thank you for being with us, Professor conducting AI and physics research at MIT as part of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, author of the New York Times bestseller, Life 3.0, being human in the age of artificial intelligence. I hope this conversation is just the beginning. Thanks for joining us.

Coming up next, Citizens Bank has severed financial ties with core civic and geo-group. Two of the nation's largest private operators of ICE jails. We'll look at the grassroots movement that has been pushing for divestment. Back in 20 seconds. Living in Dystopia by Sarah Michelle Ozel. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org. I'm Amy Goodman with Nermyn Scher. We turn now to news that Citizens Bank has severed financial ties to core civic and the geo-group, two of the nation's largest private prison operators that work directly with ICE to run immigration jails.

The National Bank has faced significant pushback from social justice groups and activists for providing more than $2.5 billion in financing to the two private prison companies. Earlier this month, Citizens Bank said it was ending its lending relationships with the GEO group and Core Civic, insisting that the move was a, quote, business decision based on changed commercial circumstances and unrelated to protest actions and the growing boycott of Citizens Bank. Three days before, citizens decided to end its financial relationship with the GEOP, group in Core Civic, the township of Montclair, New Jersey, voted to pull its $91 million account from Citizens Bank. This is Montclair Mayor Renee Buscarville, speaking in favor of

divesting from Citizens Bank at a Montclair Township Council meeting earlier this month. It's not just a one-out. It's like a wake-up call that I think that we need to be more diligent about who we're doing business with, who we're investing with, what conference, tracks we're giving out and really, you know, when we're doing these things, maybe we should be just a little bit more aware and take a look at the behind the scenes types of things. And even when we were talking about, you know, well, what next? You take it from citizens. And I'm saying, well, let's make sure that we know wherever we go, whether it's Valley, Bank

of America, whoever it may be, that we know who, you know, they're doing banking with. because there's a lot of other categories, none as urgent as this is immediately in this setting here and now with what's going to Delaney. Montclair's decision follows a decision last month by Jersey City in New Jersey to divest from Citizens Bank and close its over $250 million account. The GEO group runs the Delaney Hall Federal Immigration Detention Center in Newark, New Jersey, and Core Civic operates the Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth, New Jersey. For more, we're joined by two guests. Reverend John Edgerton is the senior minister of Old South Church and Boston, a board member of the Greater Boston Interfaith organization, which has withdrawn $3 million from Citizens Bank over its concerns with the bank's relationship with Core Civic and Geo. And joining us here in New York is Jake Ephros, a Jersey City Council member who helped lead the effort to close Jersey City's $250 million citizens bank account. Jake, let's begin with you, council member. Talk about how this happened. This is happening all over the country, but kind of piecemeal in a way that people don't realize how much pressure has been brought on Citizens Bank, whether or not they admit that this has led to their decision.

Yeah, it really is pressure. And just first, thank you so much for having me on the show. It's really an honor to be here. Before I was on Jersey City Council, I got my start as a Democratic Socialist of America member, organizing the Abolish ICE movement, fighting against ICE detention centers and jails in New Jersey. And just at the beginning of this year, it was elected for this first term as a city council member in Jersey City. And the pressure at Delaney Hall was growing. The conditions were detained. deteriorating and resistance on the inside led by detainees was escalating, particularly by hunger strikers and labor strikers. And Delaney Hall in Norque includes residents of Jersey City. So this was, of course, a concern of my constituents being there. And it just so happened that the

DeIce Citizens Bank movement, these amazing activists who are identifying just how much financing of Geo Group, which operates Delaney, as you mentioned, and of course, Civic, just how much financing Citizens Bank does. 2.5 billion, I think, was the amount of financing going to these companies. D.I. Citizens Bank was doing this great work. I had just started hearing about it, maybe days or a week before a city council meeting, where I was reviewing the agenda the week before the city council meeting, and I noticed that we had a vote to authorize where our money essentially was being held in different banks. And I saw that Citizens Bank was on this list, and that raised alarms for me right away. So it was absolutely thanks to the incredible

work of the activist with the D.I. Citizens Bank movement that I would even know to look out for that. And I immediately told the administration. I worked with my other DSA counterpart, Councilman Joel Brooks on our city council, and we demanded the full divestment of the 200-plus million dollars that we had in Citizens Bank. And we put forward a resolution that was unanimously voted on by our city council. And to their credit, the administration under Mayor Solomon, they acted immediately and made that divestment happen. So Citizens Bank is the 17th or 18th largest bank in the U.S. Have you heard any responses from people who have accounts at Citizens Bank, and were any of them among the activists who pushed for this decision?

There were some concerns that I heard on the ground here and there from people who might have accounts. We are not served enough in Jersey City by banks, and there's not enough banking, especially in the south side of Jersey City. And there are a couple branches of Citizens Bank there. But it was incredibly important, and I think there was an overwhelming consensus that those questions need to be tackled on their own, and we need to tackle this, like, serious, moral, political and material concern of having 200-plus million in Citizens Bank. You know, recently we had Julie Cohen and Paul Barrett in the studio.

They privately had a citizen bank account. Paul Barrett had worked for the Wall Street Journal. In other places, Julie Cohen is the Oscar-nominated filmmaker who made RBG. Earlier this year, she and Paul Barrett wrote an op-ed for NJ.com about their decision to close their accounts over the bank's complete. with Delaney Hall. We want to go to a clip of Julie speaking at Bloomfield, New Jersey Town Council earlier this month. I think it's important to be really clear that this is about citizens' complicity with ICE. My husband and I actually closed our own accounts at the Citizens Branch on Broad Street in December

after we learned that Citizens was providing financing for Geo Group and Core Civic, the private prison companies that are behind the now notorious ICE detention at Delaney Hall, at Dilley in Texas, where there are parents and children together in a center where there are zero criminals, at Elizabeth detention, and a lot of places where there are, there's a lack of, due process and where there are all kinds of human rights violations. We didn't want our own money going to that, and we certainly don't want our tax dollars in bank accounts that are associated with ICE and that really enable some of ICE's worst behavior.

So that's the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Julie Cohen, who together with her husband, Paul Barrett, pulled out their accounts from Citizens Bank. We're joined in Boston by Reverend John Edgerton, Senior Minister of the Old South Church in Boston, board member of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, which is withdrawn $3 million from Citizens Bank. If you can, Reverend, talk about your decision. And, I mean, we're talking about cities. Now we're talking about churches. What was the decision of the church?

And did Citizens Bank respond? So we've been involved in this with our sister, Congress. Our sister organization, Greater Cleveland Congregations, with the D.I. Coalition, which is an all-volunteer grassroots-led organization for many months. We attended the annual shareholders meeting in Rhode Island and informed the board, informed the CEO, Bruce Van Zan. In the wintertime of our concerns about this, we asked for a meeting to discuss this. And they never actually made that meeting happen. And so we told them, if you won't meet with us, won't discuss our concerns, then we will withdraw a million dollars on this date. And we did so, and they didn't reply.

And we then withdrew two million dollars from that. And then, of course, when Jersey City and Montclair withdrew $356 million, municipalities just have more zeros at the end of their bank accounts than churches do. And so this was really a broad movement. and the pressure became too much for citizens to bear, and they had to do the right thing. And so Reverend Edgerton, do you hope that other churches follow suit? And is there any indication? Have you heard anything about how that may happen, taking your example? So this became really quite a broad movement very quickly. We originally had about $13 million that were organized of people who said that they would be willing to,

withdraw their money, that quickly drew, grew to $24 million. And those organizations still have those deposits pledged. And so we're going to be watching to make sure that citizens follows through with what they've said that they're going to do, that they will, in fact, cut ties completely and quickly with CoreC Civic and Geo Group. We want to verify that they have done that. And there is plenty of public pressure to make that happen. Reverend Edgerton, Citizens Bank said, quote, Citizens has been disappointed that the activists have dragged into what is largely a political matter. If you can respond to that, and also, did citizens CEO say he would meet with you? And did he?

So CEO Bruce Van Zan committed at their annual shareholder meeting to meet with Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, said that he would make it happen within two weeks. that didn't occur. And then later on, they sent us a letter saying that they were reneging on that promise to meet with us because we were making false and misleading statements. They didn't let us know what exactly we had said that was wrong. We stand by the things that we have said. We would very much like to meet still with CEO Bruce Van Zand. There has been a lot of reputational damage done to the bank that we bank with. And we can give them some good advice about how to rebuild that trust. This is a situation that has become terrible for Citizens Bank. Because of their own decisions,

they are stuck between a rock and a hard place on the one hand of a public that realizes that what they're doing is unconscionable and does not want to bank with such an entity and a regulatory structure which is vindictive and would punish them if they were seen to go against the administration. That is because of Citizens Bank own choices to put themselves into that position. Nobody forced them to get involved in the private prison business. In 2021, almost every big bank got out of that dirty business. Citizens stayed in it. They shouldn't have.

And now they need to repair their reputation with the people of this country. Reverend John Edgerton, senior minister of Old South Church and Boston, board member of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, which is what's drawn $3 million from Citizens Bank. And Jake Ephros, a Jersey City Council member who helped lead the effort to close Jersey City's $250 million citizens bank account. Coming up, we go to Springfield, Ohio. As ICE is reportedly stepping up plans to arrest and deport Haitians across the country, hundreds of thousands of Haitians lost their TPS status this week. Stay with us.

Way of it's a coo'oeuio, a bit of a day, a tree that's a soul a man. This is democracy now, democracy now. I'm Mimi Goodman with Narmie. H.I.S. is reportedly stepping up plans to arrest and deport. Haitians after an estimated 300,000 Haitians just lost their status under TPS, the temporary protected status program. The program ended on Monday after the Supreme Court last month,

sided with the Trump administration to end TPS programs for Haitians and Syrians. Since that ruling, panic and fear have swept through Haitian communities across the United States. According to an internal government document, the plans to round up and deport Haitian immigrants could start as early as this week. The planned deportation operations outlined in the internal government document could focus in part on the thousands of Haitians who live in Ohio, many of whom live and work in the city of Springfield. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Vice President J.D. Vance and President Trump amplified racist, baseless claims that Haitians in Springfield were eating people's pets. their dogs and cats. In an interview with CBS News on Monday, Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine,

described the Trump plans to deport Haitians as a mistake. It's not good for the United States, and it's not good for the state of Ohio. These are people who have helped Springfield really come back. Springfield has been making a real comeback. The Haitians who are living there and employed there, they came there to work. And they came there because there were jobs that were not being filled by other people. And so to lose them and have them not be able to work anymore and possibly, you know, taken out of this country, it's frankly a blow to Springfield.

And it's a blow to the state of Ohio. Again, that is Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine. For more, we go to Springfield, Ohio, where we're joined by Villis Dorsenville. He is the co-founder and executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield and is among the over the over-year-old. and is among the over 300,000 Haitians in the U.S. who've just lost their TPS, temporary protected status. In these last minutes we have, Vilas, if you can talk about the fear people have,

what are people doing, including yourself this week, losing your TPS status? Thank you for having me. I think that the fear is so huge in our community. especially when folks know that they won't be able to continue to live here. And now I believe that DHS has changed the strategy. Over the past few days, they started sitting calling check letters to folks. And when they get to those facilities, they just put like an ankle bracelets on the feet.

It is so humiliating to see parents, fathers and mothers who have not been committing any crime now with some type of ankle bracelets on their feet. And that has created so much fear. Not only those folks, they lost their jobs. They lost their privilege to drive. And now they have a bracelet on their feet on a daily basis. and they give them one month a time to go back to court. So it's really humiliating to see that happening to our people in our community right now. So Veles-Dorsenville, if you could talk about, you know, the conditions prevailing now in Haiti,

why so many Haitians have fled the country and what it would mean for them to be the ones here to be deported back to Haiti? Basically, I always tell people that it's not a question of us not willing to go back to our country. So now if I can describe for you a little bit the condition of our country, we have an international report that has not been in operations for over the past two years, because when American aircraft landed at that particular airport, the gang members should at them. We have more than 1.3 million people have been displaced, and 5 million people are in acute food insecurity.

So there are women and girls live in shelters on a daily basis, people who are being exposed to rape. So this is the condition. We have a government that just cannot deliver political goods. And actually, the gang members, they become, stronger and stronger on a daily basis. This is the condition of Haiti, and there is no job opportunity. There is no Haitian dream for those folks.

And these are the push factors that cause them to leave the country. So I think that the Haitians here, they are willing to go back. But at the end of the day, they do not have a country to go back to. I mean, the U.S. government understands full well how dangerous it is to go back to Haiti. They have warned Americans not to go to Haiti. In this last few seconds we have, Villis, you have lost your TPS status. What are you doing? It's like a catch-22 for me because me as well, I'm a TPS holder.

So I'm just laying in low and sit and observe what will happen to our community next. Veles Dorsenville, we thank you so much for speaking up and out on Democracy Now, co-founder and executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield. Ohio. That does it for our show. I'll be in Martha's Vineyard, July 31st, Friday night, to speak after the documentary about Democracy Now, Steal the Story, please, with the director, Tia Lesson, and then on to Edinburgh and London. You can check our website at DemocracyNow.org. I'm Amy Goodman with Nermin Shea for another edition of Democracy Now.