Protesters, Mariachis Rally Outside Chase CEO Jamie Dimon's Home

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — Protesters had one message for Jamie Dimon outside his Upper East Side home on Valentine's Day: Break up with private prisons.

Dozens of protesters, joined by a band of Mariachi performers, held a rally outside the JP Morgan Chase CEO's home on Fifth Avenue and East 96th Street Thursday morning to deliver a petition calling on the finance giant to divest in companies such as Geo Group and CoreCivic, which run private prisons used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain migrants.

The rally was organized by groups such as Make the Road New York, the Center for Popular Democracy and Rainforest Action Network as part of the Corporate Backers of Hate campaign. The campaign's goal is to call out JP Morgan Chase and other institutions such as Wells Fargo for bankrolling private prison companies.

"We are here denouncing Jamie Dimon’s hypocrisy. On one hand he criticizes Trump’s inhumane policies of separating families while his company JPMorgan Chase finances the country’s largest private prison and immigrant detention companies, profiting off by putting immigrant families in jail," Ana Maria Archila, of the Center for Popular Democracy, said in a statement.

Dimon was able to leave his Upper East Side home without interacting with the protesters, so they followed him to JP Morgan's headquarters at 270 Park Avenue, organizers said. Protesters delivered a petition with 100,000 signatures once they arrived at the Midtown office tower.

The petition was coordinated with a group in California, who delivered the petition to Wells Fargo executives in the Golden State.

"The prisons and detention centers that they are financing are sites of death, abuse, and discrimination against immigrants, Black people, people of color, and TGNCIQ+ (transgender, gender non-conforming, intersex, and queer) people. Bankrolling this type of oppression is reprehensible, and it must stop," Natalia Aristizabal, of Make the Road New York, said in a statement.

Thursday's protest was the second Corporate Backers of Hate movement at Dimon's Upper East Side home. Eight people were arrested during a July 2018 protest at the building after blocking Park Avenue traffic.

Photos courtesy Make the Road New York