Thousands of high school students across the country are walking out of their classrooms to protest the Trump administration’s mass deportations, demanding an end to ICE’s immigration-enforcement tactics. Many students chose to walk out on January 30, joining a national shutdown that called for “no school, no work, no shopping,” but protests have continued since, with hundreds of Chicago students walking out through February.
Students at the University of Minnesota, along with hundreds of other organizations, initiated the national shutdown in response to the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) presence in Minneapolis and other cities across the country. It didn’t take long for the movement to become national—from students protesting in Texas (much to Governor Greg Abbott’s dismay) to students in New York walking out of what is thought to be the largest public high school in the country, young people are fed up with the violence unfolding on their social media feeds and in their own communities.
“We are watching. We know what’s happening," says Jessica Alvarez, a senior attending Mt. Eden High School (MEHS) in Hayward, California. "Everything is on our phones, it’s right in front of us.” Alvarez is also part of the MEHS Social Justice Club, one of many student groups to organize a walkout on January 30. “This was our way of having something in our control,” Alvarez says.
The MEHS student organizers saw other local schools protesting earlier in the week and felt called to rally their own peers, a pattern across states as students continue to encourage neighboring schools to follow suit. “It’s horrifying to see violence being inflicted so openly, so publicly,” Lauren Cuesta, another MEHS student and Social Justice Club leader, tells Teen Vogue. “I don’t know how it’s so normalized for me, as a teenager in high school, that I’ve seen so much violence online, and it’s not just CGI gore. It’s something that’s happened on the street.”
Violence escalates, impacting education
For weeks, federal agents have been unleashing violence in Minnesota's Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul. This aggressive, large-scale operation followed a series of immigration crackdowns in cities nationwide, including Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles. On January 7, an ICE agent in Minneapolis killed Renee Nicole Good as multiple videos show her driving away from the scene. Just two weeks later, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents wrestled down and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti.
Good and Pretti’s deaths have sparked a wave of protests, but they are two among many who have experienced violence at the hands of ICE. This year, so far, eight people have died in dealings with ICE; and in 2025, at least 32 people died in ICE custody, the deadliest year in two decades for the agency.
Given the ICE raids on local businesses and school grounds, agents abducting people from their homes with no warrant, and taking children, such as five-year-old Liam Ramos (who was taken alongside his father; both have since been released), the increasingly hostile ICE operations are impacting every facet of kids’ lives. Parents are even choosing between bringing their sick children to the hospital or keeping them home, where they are less likely to encounter federal agents. ICE has detained some parents, while others are afraid to leave their home, forcing some families to rely on mutual aid networks to get children to and from school, if they attend class at all.
Minneapolis and St. Paul's public schools announced they would offer virtual learning for anyone who needed it. As of late January, more than 6,000 students—almost 25% of the population attending St. Paul public schools—had registered to stay home and attend online classes. School attendance is dropping across the board, with some schools seeing attendance rates sink to around 50 or 60%.
Despite DHS claims that ICE activity on school grounds should be “extremely rare,” according to K-12 Dive’s tracker, there has been ICE activity in at least nine schools or districts since April 2025. In January alone, six schools in Minnesota were impacted.
School staff members are overwhelmed by supporting struggling students and community members as school participation drops. One school social worker told The Minnesota Star Tribune late last month that the situation is in “crisis mode”; and an academic coach said the impact of ICE's presence on students and families is “worse than Covid.”
On January 7, CBP agents showed up at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, detaining a staff member. Days later, students organized a walkout in response. One student organizer told BreakThrough News, “You can just tell that everybody’s hurting.”
Students take action despite fear
“Seeing everything that’s happening in Minneapolis is sick,” says Jonathan, a 16-year-old student at Lakeside High School in Georgia, who chose not to share his last name. “People my age are afraid to go to school because of what’s happening…. ICE is being funded more rapidly than education now.”
President Donald Trump began his second term by gutting the Department of Education and withholding funds from schools with a curriculum that did not comply with the administration. This year, Trump increased the ICE budget to $85 billion (just 10 years ago, the annual budget was less than $6 billion), making it the highest-funded US law enforcement agency.
Jonathan and other Lakeside High School students organized an anti-ICE walkout late last month, drawing more than 1,500 people and inspiring hundreds of other students in the area to walk out on January 30. He says it hurts to see how the US treats immigrants and how hard it is to build a life here. He started organizing about a year ago after learning about civil rights movements, including the East LA Walkouts, a series of high school walkouts led by Mexican American students in 1968 to demand better education and treatment.
“I heard there was going to be a nationwide walkout for students,” Jonathan says. “I’m mostly a quiet person at school, but I knew I couldn’t miss this opportunity to speak up and show solidarity with my community.”
Just months prior to the walkout, in June, PSL Atlanta, part of the Party for Socialism & Liberation, shared a statement on Instagram condemning alleged police brutality at a peaceful protest on Chamblee Tucker Road in Georgia. “Students from my school were thrown on the ground by police and tear-gassed,” Jonathan says, adding that the January 30 walkout offered students an opportunity to protest and find community after the “traumatic” events over the summer.
“We’re going to continue to fight. Something adults should’ve been doing all along,” Jonathan says. He reports seeing folks in the community retreating out of fear, and he misses hearing people in the neighborhood talking, laughing, and enjoying life. “I’m hoping to see our community outside again.” To build on their momentum, Lakeside High School students hosted another walkout on February 5.
Jackie, who chose not to share her last name, is a high school senior and a child of immigrants. She also walked out on January 30. “My mom has told me, ‘Make sure to have pictures of your passport.’ She’s living in fear," Jackie says, "and I’m also now living in fear that one day I’ll come home and she won’t be there anymore.”
Izzy, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, is a student at California's MEHS. She echoes Jackie’s fears: “I don’t want to stay along the sidelines and just stay quiet on this matter. I want to use my voice. But through all of it, I’m at this moment, still living in fear,” she explains. “I have a person in my ear, my mom, telling me to be careful. She knows that I’m trying my best to advocate, but I still have to keep in mind that I could be like any of these other victims that I see on the internet.”
As momentum builds, students say there is more to come
Students walking out must weigh several risks, including potential interactions with federal agents or aggravated community members, and consequences at school. In Nebraska, a car toting a MAGA flag hit a teenage girl who was partaking in a protest. In Texas earlier in February, a man in his 40s wearing a MAGA hat reportedly showed up to a high school walkout, allegedly attacking a teenage girl. Students defended her, and he was later charged with two counts of assault.
Fueled by a sense of justice, and despite these risks, students continue to walk out. In states like Texas, which maintains some of the country’s strictest immigration laws, community members are especially ready to take action. Reese Armstrong is a senior at McCallum High School in Austin, the co-chair of McCallum Young Democratic Socialists of America, and a candidate for Travis County commissioner at 18 years old. On Friday, according to Armstrong, they helped organize a walkout with more than 1,000 students.
In Texas, Armstrong says, “people feel the pain at the border”; nearly everyone at the walkout knew someone who has been directly impacted by cruel immigration policy or is from an immigrant family. “People are sick and tired of an ever-expanding police state that threatens to take away them and their neighbors,” they say. “It is something so widely and deeply felt, and so obviously cruel, that people want to see change."
Across the city of Austin, Adeleah Cardenas, a senior at Akins Early College High School, also organized a walkout with her classmates. This walkout was not Cardenas’s first protest; in elementary school, she says, she led protests with her classmates against deportation.
When Trump was first elected in 2016, Cardenas was eight years old: “I remember walking into elementary school and noticing how quiet it was, because so many of my friends were absolutely terrified of what was going to happen to their families,” Cardenas tells Teen Vogue, adding that it was devastating when he was elected again.
She hopes students continue to attend protests and actions outside of school walkouts, stressing the importance of young people speaking up. “If our voice didn’t matter," Cardenas says, "the government wouldn’t be trying to shut us up all the time.”
