The same question echoes again and again: Why isn’t protesting getting us anywhere? After a year of marches, chants, hashtags, and collective fury, ICE hasn’t weakened—it has become more violent, more funded, and more politically shielded. Which forces the next question: what kind of pressure truly works? This is the reality of a capitalist government: public outrage raises moral questions, but money determines outcomes.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson notes that it would take only sixteen Republican senators to defund ICE and twenty-three to impeach the president. On paper, those numbers seem small. But focusing solely on Senate arithmetic overlooks a deeper truth: public outrage alone rarely moves federal powerholders. Senators do not fear protests. They fear losing power and losing money.
And to understand what could move them, we have to understand what ICE actually is.
ICE is not simply a government agency. It is a corporate ecosystem built on private prison contracts, surveillance technology, and a network of financiers and donors. Recent federal budget legislation dramatically expanded this ecosystem; the Brennan Center describes it as a newly formalized “deportation-industrial complex” fueled by tens of billions allocated to detention and enforcement (Brennan Center for Justice, 2025). Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group, both linked to pro-Trump political donations, benefit directly from these contracts (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington [CREW], 2025). On the tech side, Palantir received more than $30 million from ICE to build its AI-driven “ImmigrationOS” surveillance platform (American Immigration Council, 2025).
This ecosystem survives because it is fed by banks, hedge funds, pension plans, and political donors. When that economic network is stable, ICE remains politically insulated. But when investors perceive reputational risk, when tech employees protest, or when major banks pull their financing, the calculus shifts—because senators detect material consequences.
And that shift has already begun. Between 2018 and 2020, sustained public pressure forced major banks—including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, SunTrust, and BNP Paribas—to sever ties with CoreCivic and GEO Group (Simon, 2019). Analysts estimated that these companies stood to lose as much as 70–80% of their private financing (Equal Times, 2019). That loss isn’t symbolic. It undermines the financial foundation that keeps these companies operating.
Tech companies have faced similar disruption. Worker-led movements such as #NoTechForICE pressured Amazon, Microsoft, Palantir, and Thomson Reuters to defend or reconsider their ICE contracts (American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU], 2020; Helmore, 2019). Executives can ignore protesters, but they cannot ignore their own engineers, shareholders, and risk officers.
These are the kinds of disruptions that ultimately move politicians. When donors see ICE as a financial liability, when corporations fear reputational collapse, when investors divest, and when tech firms reassess contracts, senators lose the insulated environment that once allowed them to dismiss public dissent. Research on money in politics consistently shows that financial incentives, donor pressure, and electoral incentives shape legislative behavior (Hall & Fouirnaies, 2022; Center for Political Accountability, 2022). When the money moves, politics follow.
So if protests feel ineffective, it’s not because they don’t matter—protests matter deeply. But marching alone cannot penetrate the economic networks that actually sustain ICE.
To change the future of ICE, we do not start on the Senate floor. We start by destabilizing the structure that keeps ICE profitable. We start with the money.
References (APA 7)
American Civil Liberties Union. (2020, September 9). ACLU calls on tech companies to end their alliance with ICE and CBP. https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/aclu-calls-on-tech-companies-to-end-their-alliance-with-ice-and-cbp/
American Immigration Council. (2025, August 21). ICE to use ImmigrationOS by Palantir, a new AI system, to track immigrants’ movements. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-immigrationos-palantir-ai-track-immigrants
Brennan Center for Justice. (2025, August 13). Big Budget Act creates a “deportation-industrial complex.” https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/big-budget-act-creates-deportation-industrial-complex
Center for Political Accountability. (2022). Conflicted consequences: The risks of corporate political spending and the impact of shareholder oversight. https://www.politicalaccountability.net
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. (2025, July 23). Trump’s budget bill benefits private immigration detention companies that donated to Trump. https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/trumps-budget-bill-benefits-private-immigration-detention-companies-that-donated-to-trump/
Equal Times. (2019, August 21). In the US, big banks are divesting from private prisons thanks to anti-ICE activism. https://www.equaltimes.org/in-the-us-big-banks-are-divesting-from-private-prisons-thanks-to-anti-ice-activism
Hall, A. B., & Fouirnaies, A. (2022). How do electoral incentives affect legislator behavior? Journal of Politics, 84(3), 1786–1800.
Simon, M. (2019, September 30). GEO Group runs out of banks as 100% of banking partners say no to the private prison sector. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/morgansimon/2019/09/30/geo-group-runs-out-of-banks-as-100-of-banking-partners-say-no-to-the-private-prison-sector/
Helmore, E. (2019, August 16). Hundreds of Google employees urge company to resist support for ICE. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/16/hundreds-of-google-employees-urge-company-to-resist-support-for-ice
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