Laura Berlin never set out to become the subject of a federal intelligence bulletin. She just wanted to know who was getting paid.
How a spreadsheet became a movement
After watching footage of people deported to a Salvadoran prison with no hearing before a judge, Berlin started tracing the money behind ICE's deportation machine. Combing through corporate filings, government contracts and campaign-finance records, she built an interactive database called Who Is Profiting From ICE?
Laura Berlin's interactive map tracks companies and organizations that financially benefit from ICE's deportation operations.
Two companies caught her attention immediately: GEO Group and CoreCivic, which together landed nearly $1 billion in ICE contracts during year one of the current deportation campaign, providing detention beds, staffing and ankle monitors for people awaiting hearings.
Berlin learned that Wells Fargo and Bank of America had already backed away from financing the pair, so she went looking for whoever hadn't. That search led her to Citizens Bank, a Providence, Rhode Island-based lender with more than a thousand branches across the East Coast.
Her research sat largely unnoticed until a Boston coalition of activists, who had just claimed credit for persuading Avelo Airlines to abandon its ICE deportation-charter contract, built a national campaign around her data. Their first planned protest outside a Citizens Bank branch fell on the same January morning an ICE agent fatally shot Minneapolis resident Renee Good. Good hadn't been the target of an arrest: she'd parked in a residential street to warn neighbors that federal agents were nearby, a tactic that has become common in immigrant neighborhoods, and was struck as she began driving away while agents surrounded her vehicle.
The tragedy sent Berlin's traffic from a few thousand monthly visitors into the millions almost overnight. Two and a half weeks later, Border Patrol agents killed 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti, adding fresh urgency to the campaign.
Pressure campaign forces a bank's hand
By summer, organizers had staged 140 protests across 17 states and collected $25 million in individual withdrawal pledges from Citizens Bank customers. Local governments piled on: Jersey City moved to pull $265 million over the bank's financial ties to Delaney Hall, a GEO-run detention facility that had drawn widespread condemnation, and Montclair followed with another $90 million.
Citizens caved in July, cutting ties with both GEO and CoreCivic. In an unsigned blog post, the bank called it "a business decision based on changed commercial circumstances" and denied the move reflected any judgment about the companies themselves. A spokesman for the coalition that partnered with Berlin said the reputational hit was central to the strategy and that the bank was clearly rattled by the damage to its image. Around that same window, CoreCivic offloaded a pair of its California facilities into federal ownership, part of a transaction with DHS worth upward of $1.5 billion that freed up cash and eased the company's own reliance on bank credit.
DHS answers with its terrorism-alert code
While activists were squeezing Citizens Bank, the federal government was watching Berlin's website too, and treating it very differently than she did. A February intelligence bulletin, obtained by the open-government group Property of the People and first reported by USA TODAY, warned that anti-ICE actors, including self-described anarchists, might escalate peaceful protest into vandalism, citing the potential use of "spray paint, projectiles, blunt and edged objects and improvised incendiary devices." Reporting on how the bulletin moved between DHS and the Philadelphia Police Department is inconsistent; the department has been described both as a source that fed information to DHS and, separately, as a recipient distributing the material onward. What is clear is that the bulletin itself was filed under HSEC SIN 8, a Homeland Security intelligence code previously used to flag propaganda videos from the Islamic State and pipe-bomb threats.
Even the document flags, in red lettering, its own overlap with speech the Constitution protects.
"DHS is targeting even the mildest anti-ICE dissent as extremism and terrorism," said Ryan Shapiro, Property of the People's executive director. In his view, the bulletins aren't really about protecting anyone — they're about converting police departments into a taxpayer-funded security detail for the companies profiting from deportations.
A Philadelphia police spokesperson said the department's bulletins are meant to identify emerging risks for situational awareness, not to brand lawful protest as criminal activity. A DHS spokesperson didn't directly address the bulletin naming Berlin's site, saying only that local law enforcement partners help sharpen the department's national threat picture.
Berlin's site isn't an isolated case. The same administration pressured Apple into pulling ICEBlock, a crowdsourced app with more than a million downloads that let users report ICE sightings nearby, and has opened inquiries into Minnesota labor and climate organizers as well as a New York man investigated simply for emailing an ICE director.
Why this hits Latino communities especially hard
None of this is abstract for the families whose relatives fill the detention beds Berlin's map tracks. GEO Group and CoreCivic operate a large share of the country's detention capacity, and ICE enforcement records analyzed by Syracuse University's TRAC clearinghouse show citizens of Mexico and Central America made up the largest shares of people targeted in the opening weeks of the current enforcement surge. A federal bulletin equating scrutiny of that industry with terrorist-propaganda language lands at a moment when 59% of Latinos report having personally witnessed or learned of ICE arrests near where they live, according to Pew Research Center, an already tense climate for anyone documenting enforcement or organizing a boycott.
Berlin, whose sons are part Guatemalan, says the stakes are personal. She's acknowledged feeling both angry about the situation and afraid of what it could mean for her own children.
The money trail keeps growing
Berlin's database also tracks campaign contributions. Her count: upward of 450 candidates spanning both parties, from President Trump and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, whose campaigns show donations traceable to GEO, CoreCivic or Management and Training Corporation. Combined, the two largest firms put roughly $7.3 million into political giving and lobbying in 2025. A CoreCivic spokesman said the company backs candidates "open to the solutions" it offers, regardless of party.
Bianca Tylek, who heads the advocacy group Worth Rises, said the industry is "trying to utilize political connections to extract as much as possible from taxpayer coffers."
Berlin isn't slowing down. She's now mapping the companies that help federal agents locate immigrants using commercially available data. "This information is available from the government's own databases," she said, adding that she finds it troubling that DHS would treat a public-records tool as a potential threat.
