About 50 students streamed out of the front entrance of Hope High School at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, donning backpacks and protest signs scrawled with messages condemning U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Marching down snowy streets, the group merged with Moses Brown High School students before joining the greater Providence community at a rally outside the Rhode Island State House.
The student walkout was part of a broader anti-ICE protest in Rhode Island and across the nation on Jan. 30. The demonstrations came in the wake of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration officials in Minneapolis this January.
“What ICE is doing is purely illegal … they are ripping apart families that don’t deserve to be ripped apart,” Nayla Quiroa, a 16-year-old at Hope, told The Herald. “I’d say let ICE melt.”
ICE and the White House did not respond to The Herald’s requests for comment.
The Providence student walkout was planned by youth organizers and activist groups throughout Rhode Island, said Alisson Aviles, a Classical High School junior and co-director of the Providence Student Union. More than 14 Rhode Island schools were slated to participate, according to the Rhode Island chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
The walkout was planned in less than a week and required an “all hands on deck” effort, Aviles said. “We had a very big turnaround for how short of an amount of time we had.”
“Friday was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had,” Moses Brown School senior Josselyn Wolf told The Herald. “We wanted to turn the feeling of being paralyzed into the feeling of being mobilized and coming together as a collective to affirm that this is not the country that our generation wants to inherit.”
Moses Brown ninth-grader Phoenyx Algava said that the protest showed her how the community can come together to make a change. “I think a lot of times people think that it’s overwhelming to say something or that you feel like you don't have a voice, but I feel like this (protest) shows that no matter how little you can do, it always means something,” she said.
“You should start standing up to the things you disagree with as soon as you feel like you should be able to,” Eammon Pineault, a seventh grader at Nathan Bishop Middle School, told The Herald. “We should have more of these,” he added.
High school student involvement extended beyond Providence, Aysha Facey, a senior at East Greenwich High School, told The Herald.
Facey and their classmate Wen Shi had initially wanted to organize a protest sometime around Presidents’ Day but, once they heard a student walkout was being planned for Jan. 30, they moved up their timeline.
“My father … was deported when I was younger,” Facey said. “Everything that’s going on right now just doesn’t really sit right with me, not just because of my own experiences, but because we’re watching history repeat itself right in front of our eyes.”
Shi said that many logistical details had to be worked out quickly, including ensuring students would not face repercussions for leaving school in the middle of the day and organizing carpools from East Greenwich to the State House.
“Multiple students were reaching out to me personally to try to figure something out amongst their school,” Shi said. “I think I’ve gained at least 50 new contacts on my phone.”
Kristin Ross, a junior at South Kingston High School, helped organize “about 100 kids” at her school to walk out at 1 p.m.
“It was sort of a last-minute thing,” she said, adding that their distance from the State House made students want to do something more local to “stand in solidarity with everyone at the State House and in Minneapolis.”
High school senior Ambujam Karuna Lohmann helped organize a walkout at Narragansett High School. The far reach of the walkout “speaks to how universal this issue is,” she said. “It should not be considered political to support the humane treatment of people.”
Makayla Baez, a junior at the Jacqueline M. Walsh School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Pawtucket, was in English class during the time of the walkout.
“The walkout was nerve-wracking to say the least,” Baez wrote. “We didn’t want to be faced with repercussions or anything of that matter from law enforcement or even staff at school,” she added.
But Baez wrote that seeing the protest felt like seeing “one of the seven wonders of the world, or seeing the Aurora Borealis.”
“It was breathtaking,” she added.
“If we continue to stay blind to what’s happening because it’s more comfortable to live in the fact that you’re not affected by it, then people will continue to die, and we can’t let that happen,” Facey said. “This is America. This is where liberty is. Immigrants make America great, and America is a country of immigrants.”
