In the months since President Trump took office we’ve heard a lot about crackdowns on undocumented immigrants and the return of law and order. In fact, as The Atlantic recently reported, the administration is scaling up use of high-tech methods of tracking down what it deems the criminal immigrant class. In addition, the Justice Department under Attorney General Jeff Sessions has walked back an Obama-era vow to step down use of private prisons, and his “four-sentence memo rescinding Justice Department guidance to reduce the use of private prisons sent stock soaring for the two companies that dominate the industry, Geo Group and CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America).”

It was in the early 1980s that Corrections Corporation of America first broached the concept of for-profit prisons. Now the company’s offspring has seen its share price rise and anticipates an uptick in federal use of its services. Sarah Jaffe spoke with two activists who are trying to combat both the accelerated tracking of immigration and the use of for-profit prisons about an action they held in New York City on Wednesday. Their targets are not the prison companies themselves, but the big banks that prop them up. José Lopez is one of the co-organizing directors at Make the Road New Yorkand Daniel Altschuler is the organization’s director of civic engagement and research.

[For more of this story, written by Sarah Jaffe, go to http://billmoyers.com/story/pr...y-corporate-backers/]