Debanking: Suddenly, you do not have access to money
Many people think that “debanking” is the sort of thing that could only happen to international criminals or truckers in Canada who protested government-sponsored panic measures around COVID.
As Ottawa-based Rupa Subramanya reports at The Free Press, the people who think so are mistaken:
Former first lady Melania Trump alleges in her new memoir that both she and her son, Barron, were debanked. “I was shocked and dismayed to learn that my long-time bank decided to terminate my account and deny my son the opportunity to open a new one,” she wrote. (Trump’s email provider also declined to continue providing her service.) …
But it’s not just Trump supporters. Also debanked have been a number of Christian charities, including Indigenous Advance Ministries, a Memphis-based charity that does philanthropic work for orphans in Uganda, and Family Council, a pro-life charity based in Arkansas. According to Democratic lawmakers, many Arab and South-Asian Americans—who are considered “high risk” because of being Muslim—have been debanked, too.
“The Debanking of America,” October 17, 2024
Were these people debanked for reasonable cause? We don’t know. We can’t know because there are no rules in place that could be cited. The Trumps are rich and can likely weather the storm. But we should not assume that debanking only happens to the rich.
The Canadian truckers were decidedly not rich.
The growing opposition to the practice in the United States seems to be bipartisan:
In February of this year, Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley wrote to Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Company, voicing concern that debanking “poses a particularly severe threat for customers from the Muslim American community.” …
In September, Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, introduced the Saving Privacy Act. The libertarian Cato Institute explains the bill “would essentially end the practice of requiring banks to act as law enforcement agents and would prevent law enforcement agencies from accessing customers’ financial records without first obtaining a valid warrant.”
To date, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has received over 15,000 complaints about debanking.
