President Trump is absolutely right to call out “debanking,” and his $5 billion lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase and CEO Jamie Dimon puts a long-ignored abuse squarely in the national spotlight.
After January 6, JPMorgan abruptly cut ties with President Trump. The bank claims it was about “risk.” But like so many Americans who’ve been quietly debanked, Trump was never given a clear explanation, a meaningful process, or a chance to appeal. One day you have an account. The next day you’re locked out of the financial system.
This isn’t just about Donald Trump. It’s about millions of Americans—roughly 77 million—who have some form of criminal record and are treated as permanent financial untouchables.
Most people don't know this but under the current system, banks can close or deny accounts without notice, without transparency, and without proving any real threat. It happens all the time to people going through the criminal justice system. Sometimes it happens after a conviction. Other times, it happens before guilt is ever established—based solely on an arrest or a headline. That’s punishment without trial, without due process, and without accountability.
Try paying a lawyer, supporting your family, or keeping a business alive when your bank account vanishes overnight. This is happening every day.
A bank account is not a luxury—it is a prerequisite for lawful life. Without one, it’s nearly impossible to rent an apartment, receive a paycheck, or operate a small business. Debanking doesn’t make communities safer. It pushes people to the margins and makes reentry harder, not easier. It is an extra, indefinite sentence imposed not by a judge, but by corporate compliance departments.
My organization, the Tzedek Association, documented dozens of real cases in a 2021 report showing Americans cut off from banking with no explanation at all. The report unequivocally proved what countless Americans who have gone through our justice system know firsthand: banks are clearly denying and closing accounts because of felony records.
What's ironic is that Chase appears more frequently than any other bank in our report as the alleged perpetrator of account closures and denials. Of the cases we documented, nearly one in two involved JPMorgan Chase—an extraordinary concentration for the nation’s largest bank.
We brought this evidence directly to the Biden administration. We held meetings. We sounded alarms. We even partnered briefly with the NAACP to force attention.
The response? Silence. Inaction. Shrugs.
Biden’s regulators had the power to stop this and chose not to use it.
We also held several meetings with senior officials from JPMorgan Chase—whose CEO Jamie Dimon publicly champions “second chances” and co-chairs the Second Chance Business Coalition. We showed them hard evidence of this injustice from our report, but they too refused to do anything. Lots of rhetoric. No action.
The Department of Justice, Treasury, the OCC, the FDIC—every one of them already has authority to require transparency, investigate discriminatory patterns, and stop blanket, felony-based debanking. No new laws were needed. What was missing was leadership.
President Trump understands this issue because he’s lived it—and because he’s already proven he can fix a broken system. No modern president has done more for criminal-justice reform than Donald Trump did with the First Step Act, a bill we championed for more than seven years before it was passed, which President Trump signed into law in 2019 after overwhelming bipartisan support. That law gave people real second chances.
But a second chance without access to banking is a hollow promise.
If regulators won’t act, Congress should. We have been pushing a commonsense proposal—a bill we are calling the "Debanking Reform Act"—that simply says this: a criminal record alone cannot be used to deny basic financial services. The bill keeps every legitimate safeguard for fraud, money laundering, and national security. What it ends is permanent economic exile based on past mistakes.
President Trump is right to fight this battle and I hope he wins his lawsuit on behalf of the countless Americans who were wrongly debanked, humiliated, and pushed back toward failure after doing exactly what the system asked of them. Debanking is quiet, devastating, and fundamentally un-American. It’s time to stop letting Wall Street compliance culture decide who gets to participate in society.
This is another chance—for the president, for Congress, and for the country—to restore fairness, due process, and real second chances.
