Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., at the 2025 IIR Membership Annual Meeting in Washington, October 16, 2025.
Samuel Corum | Bloomberg | Getty Images
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said Wednesday he disagrees with President Donald Trump’s approach to immigration, offering a rare public rebuke from a U.S. business leader of one of Trump’s signature policies.
Dimon, speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, initially praised Trump’s moves to secure the borders of the world’s largest economy. Illegal border crossings between the United States and Mexico fell to the lowest level in 50 years for the period October 2024 to September 2025, the BBC reported citing federal data.
But Dimon, who has long advocated for immigration reform to boost U.S. economic growth, also apparently referenced videos showing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arresting people believed to be undocumented immigrants.
“I don’t like what I see, five grown men beating up a little old lady,” Dimon said. “So I think we should calm down a little bit about the internal anger over immigration.”
It is unclear whether Dimon was speaking about a specific incident, or more broadly on ICE confrontations.
In the first year of his second term, Trump overhauled U.S. immigration policy by emphasizing mass deportations, tightening access to asylum seekers and increasing spending on ICE personnel and facilities. Among a torrent of new policies that changed the landscape of seeking U.S. citizenship, the administration also rolled back guidance on where ICE arrests could take place, leading to searches of schools, hospitals and places of worship.
Unlike Trump’s first term, U.S. CEOs have mostly avoided publicly criticizing his policies. Wall Street analysts have speculated that business leaders fear retaliation from the Trump administration, which has sued media companies, universities and law firms, and are instead choosing to appeal to the president out of the spotlight.
On Wednesday, Dimon said he wanted to know more about the people involved in the ICE raids: “Are they here legally? Are they criminals? … Have they broken American law?”
“We need these people,” Dimon added. “They work in our hospitals, our hotels, our restaurants and in agriculture, and they are good people…They should be treated that way.”
“A climate of fear”For years, annually letters to shareholders and media interviews, Dimon has cited an immigration overhaul as one of the key ways to unlock higher economic growth in the United States.
The veteran CEO of JPMorgan, the world’s largest bank by market capitalizationhas previously supported a merit-based system for green cards as well as citizenship for people brought to America as children, and has pushed back against proposals to limit H-1B visas.
On Wednesday, Dimon urged Trump to provide citizenship “to hard-working people” and opportunities for “real asylum.”
“I think he can, because he controlled the borders,” Dimon said.
Later in this long interview, the editor-in-chief of The Economist Zanny Minton Bedstold Dimon that she was surprised at how cautious he and other CEOs were when talking about Trump.
“You are one of the most outspoken business leaders,” Beddoes said. “I am truly struck by the reluctance of American CEOs to say anything critical. There is a climate of fear in your country.”
Dimon fired back, saying he had made his views known on tariffs, immigration policy and Trump’s stance toward his European allies.
“I think they should change their approach to immigration,” Dimon said. “I said it. What else do you want me to say?”