On Friday, Jan. 30, millions of people throughout the country committed to an “ICE Out” to protest the enforcement of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or “ICE,” on immigrants and the observed events in the last month, with an economic staged shutdown with the goal of “no work, no school, and no shopping.” Liberty High School students held a walkout on the same day from 2 p.m. to just after school was let out in parallel to the anti-ICE goals that gathered “hundreds of students,” according to KOAA News 5.
Students looped from the front of the school to Powers Boulevard and Research Parkway and back to the school with signs such as “Safety is not a privilege,” “Grades over ICE raids” and “The wrong ice is melting” to make a statement on the abolishment of ICE.
Senior Finley Ferandez organized the protest just a day before it took place over an Instagram story to gather support. Ferandez described their motivation starting as “originally staying home to do the nation wide protest of staying home and not buying from big businesses and stuff” but their sentiment changed when they heard “Liberty students talk about how ICE is doing nothing wrong and students tell other students that they are gonna call ice on someone’s family as a joke,” and that’s when their friend and themself thought that a protest would be more impactful.
Ferandez saw immediate interest from their peers, contacting them through Instagram. Senior Allie Herndon heard about the protest from Ferandez. She helped design the posters and even the jacket that Ferandez wore during the protest, which stated “ABOLISH ICE.”
The number of anticipated participants grew in the hours before the protest. Junior participant Taylor Pierson saw the event plans on Instagram and spread the idea to those she knew would be interested, similar to others who saw the event plans early on.
The event additionally got widespread coverage from news outlets such as KOAA News 5 and CBS KKTV 11 News. “I was very proud of myself,” said Pierson, “because I was the one who emailed all of them to come, and I was really happy that they actually came.”
A major keynote of the event is that it was student-organized and the student-run administration only took action to monitor the safety of the protest. The importance of the youth to have a voice in these matters for Herndon deals with taking hold of the generational narrative: “the youth has a very specific message that they want to say, however, we are often called ‘the most unserious generation,’ and I think this thought often keeps the youth quiet unless we show them otherwise. So all over the country, people spoke out in protest to show that the youth care about the way the world is run.”
Pierson continued the same ideas as high school students being the next set of new voters: “Even if we can’t vote yet, we should still be able to express our opinions and have a change.”
After the protest, many participants were surprised at the number of students and attention they had gathered from the community. As the organizer after the protest, Ferandez said, “Some immediate impact I saw was people coming up to me and thanking me for starting something powerful and saying how they felt not as alone.”
Students took to Instagram after the protest to share pictures and videos they had taken, as well as reposting posts from news stations covering the event in order to maximize the impact of the event for the community.
