To Capital One Employees:
Each day, we witness our neighbors, community members, and loved ones living in fear. Regardless of cititizenship status, race, or age, ICE has demonstrated their willingness to blatantly disregard due process and human dignity. In only the past two weeks, ICE agents have murdered citizens, detained children, and employed racial profiling to randomly question people of color all under the guise of “securing the country from criminals.” Meanwhile, immigration detention data as of Nov. 30, 2025 shows that 48,377 out of 65,735—or 73.6% of people held in ICE detention have no criminal conviction. Many of those convicted committed only minor offenses, including traffic violations. Furthermore, many of those convictions are on technicalities due to process obstructions at USCIS.
Capital One publicly boasts of a richly diverse associate culture. Many of us have enjoyed BRG programming and cultural events hosted by our peers at work. During this time of uncertainty, Capital One has chosen to stay silent. Leaders have shared that the company’s strategic approach during this time is to “not stand out among the trees.” Capital One expects its employees to show up for them each day, but is entirely absent as we watch people who look and sound like us disappeared, caged and separated from their loved ones and legal aid.
Why should our employees care, it’s not as though Capital One has anything to do with ICE, right? WRONG!
As you know by now, Capital One is a major lender to the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems. Elbit’s surveillance technology and weapons have been tested and used on Palestinians for decades, and now they are being sold to the US government. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which houses ICE has long been a customer of Elbit's apartheid technology, including 160-foot-tall towers that provide 24/7 surveillance at the US-Mexico border to surveil, track, and profile migrants seeking asylum. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by Jewish Voice for Peace also reveal that “over a thousand police, sheriffs and federal agents, including the FBI, ICE, and Homeland Security, had flown to Israel for training in surveillance, racial profiling, crowd control, detention, and deportation.”¹ DHS / ICE is leveraging both the tools and tactics developed by the apartheid state of Israel in a symbiotic exchange of racism and dehumanization which Capital One is directly financing.
Coworkers and friends, we are well past the time where silence is acceptable. It is time to stand behind our values and stand up for our families and neighbors, and if we really want to Change Banking for Good, it is long past time for Capital One to terminate its loan with Elbit Systems.
Sincerely,
Your fellow Capital One employees.
References/notes:
The towers on Tohono O’odham land are part of a surge in wide-area persistent surveillance systems across the borderlands. Elbit Systems of America has already built 55 integrated fixed towers in southern Arizona, which company executives say cover 200 linear miles. According to information provided by a CBP spokesperson, the agency has also deployed 368 smaller surveillance towers, known as RVSS towers, in areas ranging from south of San Diego to the Rio Grande Valley, as well as along parts of the U.S.-Canadian border. Elbit Systems has frequently touted a major advantage over these competitors: the fact that its products are “field-proven” on Palestinians. The company built surveillance sensors for Israel’s separation barrier through the West Bank, which has been deemed illegal under international law,
In 2014, the US Department of Homeland Security awarded Elbit Systems a $145 million contract to erect and maintain surveillance towers along the Arizona/Sonora (Mexico) border.
Fall 2017 Elbit announced a contract to deliver even more radar and surveillance towers to militarize the Mexico-US border area, boasting it offers “field proven architecture” tested on Palestinians.
Ethnic supremacists in Israel and the United States rely on the tech behemoths — Google, Palantir, Amazon, Microsoft, and Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons developer — to surveil the movements of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, as well as the movements of immigrant communities and Palestinian rights activists in the United States.