I traveled to Minneapolis last month, where I had the chance to reconnect with old friends and also to have coffee with a colleague who, despite having a valid visa, has felt at risk whenever leaving home during these past weeks of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) violence and terror there. There’s so much we need to do with our time and money to fight to protect our neighbors and our democracy in this moment. So many of us have been looking for more ways to participate in organizing and protesting and donating to these causes and I’m no exception. But as a financial professional, a huge theme this year of my work with Values Added clients has been about how they can mobilize their wealth to fight back against ICE as well.
My partner Rebecca and I have been protesting, volunteering to notarize paperwork for and walk neighboring immigrant families to school, and raising money to support grassroots groups around the country to help progressives win back Congress and win state elections. One of our biggest vehicles for this has been donating to the Movement Voter Project, where my spouse Rebecca works, which regrants our donations to dozens of groups in swing states around the country.
But alongside political organizing and donating, there’s also more we can do as investors to use our wealth for good. The two main strategies for investors to push back on ICE are to Get Active or to Get Out. Which is right for you? Both? Neither? I’ll share more about these approaches and help you figure it out.
THE CONTEXT
Immigrant communities are being terrorized across the country. A massive boost in funding and staffing for ICE has changed the way federal law enforcement interacts with the general public.
ICE and Border Patrol “surges” have created occupation-like conditions in American cities, as the agencies make indiscriminate arrests, kill peaceful observers, drive families into hiding, and build massive camps to warehouse prisoners.
Along with the publicly-funded expansion of ICE has come a flood of money to corporations that support anti-immigration surges: private prison companies (like CoreCivic), transportation companies (like Avelo Airlines), surveillance companies (like Palantir), financial companies (like Bank of America), and contractors that provide operational support (like Hilton), to name just a few.
Some of the biggest names in tech – including Google, Meta, and Apple – have been instrumental in running recruitment ads for ICE and helping the agency squash apps that would otherwise let citizens monitor its operations.
What can we do about ICE?
As investors, we have multiple tools on hand to fight back. Investors can Get Active by using shareholder activism to pressure companies to stop cooperating with ICE. When that isn’t likely to work, instead we can Get Out by divesting from companies or funds with ties to ICE, ideally in a public way that raises awareness of how to stop profiting off of businesses that violate our values.
GET ACTIVE…
If you own stocks in ICE-supporting companies directly, you have options available to you that mutual fund investors don’t. You can assign your proxy votes to be cast to support efforts to distance a company from ICE-related activities or seek enhanced transparency and accountability, as we’ve seen within companies like the Geo Group and the Bering Straits Native Corporation.
As You Vote and Iconik have partnered to make it easy to get help voting your proxies without having to manually research and do each one and I’ve been trying that out myself. This tends to work best if you own shares in individual companies, (see our primer on personalized indexing), but there are also ETFs that will vote your shares for you in a progressive way if you like, like TCW Transform 500 ETF (VOTE), which you can read more about here.
When it comes to shareholder battles for the soul of a corporation, the type of company and its involvement with ICE matters greatly. Companies with a lot of public exposure that help ICE in ways that are economically minor (think of Target letting ICE stage in its parking lots, or airlines that run a handful of ICE flights as needed) can be swayed relatively easily.
A company whose whole business model is selling weapons to police and ICE agents or running private prisons is less likely to buckle.
But where companies do only a small portion of their business with ICE, shareholder activism can complement and amplify a public protest campaign to push a company to stop supporting ICE activities. Shareholder resolutions can be a key media hook as part of a broader activist campaign even without actually winning the official resolution votes themselves.
Home Depot is a great example of this. It has seen a wave of shareholder resolutions on a variety of issues including environmental impact (2025), deforestation (2022), and racial equity (2014) and now faces a shareholder resolution by 17 investors asking the company to conduct a review of its surveillance partnership and data-sharing with law enforcement agencies, which may be voted on in May.
The resolution takes a moral stand (citing human rights concerns) as well as a practical one, pointing out legal and financial risks associated with collaborating with agencies such as ICE.
…OR GET OUT
Unless you’re a major investor, you should resign yourself to the idea that divestment from an ICE-affiliated company – even when accompanied by a strong email – will be a mostly symbolic action.
But if you find moral or spiritual value in the practice of not profiting from evil actions, divestment from ICE-affiliated companies can pay emotional dividends. And if done in a public way, it can build community and raise awareness of the links between private business and government-backed anti-immigrant campaigns. Tesla’s share price might not immediately suffer because of people selling their Tesla shares in protest of Elon Musk, but it does shrink the market for his shares and further a public conversation that might reduce demand for new Teslas.
A FORCE MULTIPLIER FOR GOOD
The amount of impact that any single investor can have is limited, and at times it feels insignificant. But investors moving in large numbers, shifting millions (or billions) of dollars in response to national events, can change the calculus of risk and reward for corporations.
Becoming a shareholder activist and/or divesting strategically can also have a multiplier effect when these actions are taken alongside letter-writing campaigns, public protests, and efforts to name-and-shame ICE enablers.
Always consult a financial, tax, or legal professional familiar with your unique circumstances before making any financial decisions. This material is intended for educational purposes only. Nothing in this material constitutes a solicitation for the sale or purchase of any securities. Any rates of return are historical in nature and are not a guarantee of future returns, which may be lower or higher. Investments involve risk. Investment values will fluctuate with market conditions and security positions, when sold, may be worth less or more than their original cost.