In response to the terrifying intensification of ICE over the past year, both in their expanded presence and violence in cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland and Los Angeles, communities are mobilizing to protect each other, publicly denounce ICE, and form campaigns to peel away corporate support of ICE to weaken the various sources of ICE’s financial, political, and reputational power. At the end of 2025, Spotify confirmed that it stopped running recruitment ads for ICE after months of public protests and major artists withdrawing their music from the media platform. Groups are starting campaigns against global hotel chain, Hilton, for Hilton’s retribution against one of their Minneapolis hotels who refused service to ICE agents.
In early January, budget airline Avelo announced that it was ending their deportation charter flights. Avelo dropping their contract with ICE was a huge movement win due to an incredible, year-long pressure campaign led by numerous, decentralized groups across the country, including Siembra NC, New Haven Immigrants Coalition, Mijente and the National Coalition to Stop Avelo, among others.
As the organizers describe in Truthout, their campaign relied on a “mosquito strategy” – a broad range of tactics and sustained actions to strategically weaken Avelo’s pillars of support, including targeting Avelo’s government subsidies, investors, and corporate partnerships and bringing Avelo from relative obscurity into public awareness. Weakening Avelo in turn weakens ICE as the administration is then forced to contend with disruptions along their chain of operations. As Eric Blanc describes, “[b]reaking companies from ICE is a winnable struggle that can put serious pressure on the administration by raising the political cost of mass deportations and damaging ICE’s ability to function”.
We had the privilege of supporting the Stop Avelo campaign with research on Avelo’s pillars of support. With new campaigns rapidly emerging to pressure and boycott other corporations collaborating with ICE and profiting from its detention and deportation machine, it’s essential to know how to uncover information about these corporations to refine your strategy and tactics.
So, here are six areas that you can dig into to understand possible points of leverage against a corporate enabler of ICE:
Corporate leadership
Start with the corporation’s own website. Who are the key executives and board members that govern the corporation? If they have biographies, note any ties these individuals have to other notable corporations, foundations, academic institutions and local governments. Sometimes these institutions can be pressurable “secondary” focal points.
Publicly traded corporations – any corporation traded on a stock exchange – must file various reports with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC). These reports contain lots of helpful information including staff and board biographies, in addition to corporate financials, executive compensation. Find these reports by searching for the corporation on the SEC’s EDGAR database or the “Investor” section of the corporation’s website. The Annual Report (also known as the 10-K filing) and the Proxy Statement (DEF 14A filing) are great places to start.
For privately owned corporations, targeted web searches can be a great way to bring up news articles, announcements of executives joining external boards and the like. Putting the name of the executive or board member in quotes will help limit search results to only those that contain that exact name. Add the word “board” in quotes to your search (e.g., “Andrew Levy” “board”) to dig up articles about the external board appointments of key leadership.
Larger non-profits and other tax exempt organizations are required to file tax returns (known as Form 990s), which are made available to the public and contain information about key staff, board members, executive compensation, financials, endowments, investments, grants to other organizations, among much else. Search for the non-profit on ProPublica’s Non-Profit Explorer to find their most recent tax return.
- Want a deeper dive? Check out our Research Tools for Organizers trainings on researching corporations and non-profits.
Government subsidies
Whether it be airlines, data centers, real estate developers, or fossil fuel companies, many corporations take advantage of government assistance in the form of subsidies and tax breaks to finance their operations. As was the case in the Stop Avelo campaign, you can push your elected officials to pass legislation to end these corporate handouts.
Start by searching for the corporation on Subsidy Tracker, a database maintained by Good Jobs First, that tracks a whole range of corporate subsidies and incentives across various industries, cities and states.
Next, see if any additional news coverage or pieces of legislation come up in the results of a targeted keyword search (e.g., “Avelo” “subsidy”).
For subsidies passed at the state level, you can also search the databases compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures and your state legislature’s website. At the local level, cities and towns usually have a website for their legislative body where they publish a record of bills.
Contracts with DHS and ICE
Government contracts can be difficult to find and understand, but there are a few tips that can point you in the right direction. You can start by searching the USASpending.gov website which is the official listing of federal awards.
Under the Recipient dropdown, enter in the name of the corporation. This part may be tricky – a corporation may have several different LLCs, variations of their name, and/or subsidiaries that may be named in contract awards. Corporations may have a name that is similar to the name of another corporation. Spend some time verifying that the company listed as an award recipient is indeed the corporation you would like to research.
Next, under the Agency dropdown, enter “Department of Homeland Security” or “Immigration and Customs Enforcement” as the Awarding Agency. (Later, when you view the award, you’ll want to make note of whether the corporation has a contract solely with DHS, or also directly with ICE.)
Next, under Award Type, select “Contracts” to limit your results to direct contracting relationships rather than grants, loans or other forms of assistance. Just keep in mind that while you can confirm direct contracts on USASpending.gov, it can be hard to discern subcontracting relationships. In the example of Avelo, they did not have a contract directly with ICE even though they were functionally running deportation flights for ICE. Instead, they had an arrangement with CSI Aviation, a third party contractor who had direct contracts with ICE.
You may want to also apply filters to limit results to awards given in the last year, for example. You can also limit results by location—either where the contractor is operating or where the contractor is headquartered. This is a great way to determine which businesses in your city or county may be partnering directly with ICE.
Also try searching the web for any news coverage or announcements of partnerships between a given corporation and DHS/ICE. Here it can be helpful to use the filetype operator in the hopes of finding a PDF of a contract (e.g. “Avelo” “DHS” filetype:PDF).
- Want a deeper dive? Register for our upcoming training on how to research ICE contracts.
Corporate partnerships & philanthropic giving
Corporations often maintain power by creating partnerships with academic institutions, non-profits, civic organizations, and local governments. These are usually small sums of money relative to their overall revenue that function in building a rosy public image of the corporation, while at the same time buffering the corporation from accountability when confronted about any harmful business practices.
But these partnerships can also be sites of intervention for campaigners, who can highlight the contradictions between a corporation’s “friendly neighbor” image and their actual operations and then pressure local institutions to drop these relationships. In the case of Avelo, the airline had partnerships with Athletics departments at a number of universities, who in turn offered Avelo brand placement and promotional opportunities at games and local events. Avelo also sponsored various local community events and even had a raffle with United Way of Delaware to offer free flights.
You can develop a list of these types of relationships by starting first with the corporation’s website. Many corporations have a section of their website dedicated to partnerships as well as charitable activities, where they often proudly list the programs they support. For corporations that also have a foundation, you can often find information about their philanthropic activities in their tax return (Form 990-PF) on ProPublica’s Non-Profit Explorer.
As always, don’t forget to search the web for announcements of partnerships, sponsorships and charitable giving as well.
Donations to politicians
Corporations often rely on politicians as a significant pillar of support. Elected officials can pass legislation friendly to their bottom line and snuff out legislation that is not. This support also comes in the form of appointing members of the corporate class to powerful positions on working groups and task forces, and generally being available for lobbying, networking and promotional events sponsored by industry groups.
Political donations can be a clue as to how a corporation is trying to influence local, state and federal policy agendas. Campaigners can call into question why a given politician accepted this money, in an attempt to peel away the politician’s support from the corporation.
You can research donations to members of the US House and Senate by using OpenSecrets.org or the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Corporations usually give to federal Members of Congress through a corporate Political Action Committee (PAC) or employees will contribute directly to a politician. You can look up donations made by key executives and board members by entering in their name in the Donor Search. Be sure to confirm that the donor contributions you find are actually associated with the executive or board member in question and not someone else with a similar name. If you need help understanding some of the jargon associated with campaign finance, check out this glossary of terms.
For state level donations, use your state’s campaign finance database, which can usually be found by searching the web for the name of your state and the terms “campaign finance search” or “ethics department”. Many state-level databases allow you to search by donor name or by candidate name.
For municipal level donations, use your city or county’s campaign finance database. It’s important to note that different cities and states have different campaign finance disclosure requirements, so some of these databases might have lots of information and be user-friendly to navigate, while others might not. Sometimes, you may even have to travel in person to the office of the relevant department to request to look at the campaign finance records.
- Want a deeper dive? Check out our past training on how to research money in politics.
Investors
Information on investors to a given corporation can be tough to find, especially for privately held corporations, but there are a few tools that we often check.
For publicly traded companies, you can often find information on investors in their SEC filings, available on EDGAR as described above. A corporation’s Proxy Statement (DEF14 A filing) names those “beneficial owners” who own 5% or more of the company’s shares. It also includes the number of shares controlled by each director and each member of top management. Also, a corporation’s Annual Report (10-K filing) may list any credit agreements they have with banks.
You can also search Yahoo! Finance and WhaleWisdom.com to see who are the top owners of shares in a given corporation.
For privately held corporations, Pitchbook can be helpful. Pitchbook is a database on private capital markets, and often includes information on investors and funds, debt and lenders, as well as deals and limited partners. However, Pitchbook is a costly proprietary database. You may be able to gain access if you’re affiliated with a local university, which may have an institutional account with Pitchbook.
If you can’t access Pitchbook, web searching can once again serve you well. Try to find financing announcements by searching the company’s name and terms such as “investment”, “fund”, “shareholder” or “funding round”.
These six steps should allow you to cover a lot of ground in compiling a list of possible points of leverage against a corporation. As always, research is best when it’s done with others! Hold research-a-thons to split up the work and bring more people into movement spaces, share what you learn with other folks in your campaign, and find creative ways to use the information you found in your strategy.
COMMENTS