At least a couple of hundred students walked out the front doors of East High School to protest federal immigration enforcement. Similar student demonstrations, varying in size, also took place Friday at schools across Salt Lake County — including in the Salt Lake City, Granite, Canyons and Murray school districts.
The East High students walked up to nearby Sunnyside Park, some draped in flags of Latin American countries and others holding signs condemning U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some students held giant letters spelling “EAST MELTS ICE.” Passing cars honked in support.
These student protests follow the end of January “National Shutdown,” a general strike against Trump’s immigration policies following the killings of Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota. Some students at Utah schools walked out that day. There were also other student protests in Wasatch and Utah counties in February.
East students took turns giving speeches to the crowd, and one word was said repeatedly: parents.
“Our parents used to worry about our futures, but now it's the opposite. We worry about their futures,” said senior Leslie Hernandez, one of the organizers. “No matter how young or how old we are, we’ll still need our parents. It's all getting out of hand to a point where our generation had to speak up.”
Hernandez had a family member who was deported recently. That “opened my eyes a lot more to see how it really is such, like, a bad thing,” she told KUER.
Concerns about both her classmates’ families and her own were also the reason junior Cecilia Salto joined the protest. Her parents moved to the U.S. from Mexico nearly three decades ago. When she thinks of the past year and the escalation of immigration enforcement, Salto said she’s felt a lot of anxiety.
“We never know if our parents are at work, at home or detained by ICE,” Salto said. “We're at school, thinking about it, 24/7. We're at school, fearing that our parents aren't going to be there once we get home.”
Her parents try not to show how the federal immigration crackdown is affecting them, Salto said, but she can see it in their eyes and hear it in their voices that it’s been hard on them.
Salto missed her third-period class to be at the protest. She said she wanted to speak up for people who feel like they can’t speak up out of fear of retaliation.
About half of the students at East High are Hispanic, according to school demographic data.
After chanting “ICE out!” the students held a minute of silence for the people who had been killed by federal agents and families who had been separated.
East High senior Milana Nigro said she’s fed up with ICE. She felt like she had a moral obligation to protest.
“It's just like a hatred-filled group that's like kidnapping people off the streets based off of skin color, based off of their job, based off of what language people speak, regardless whether they're U.S. citizens or not, regardless whether they've committed crimes or not,” Nigro said. “It really pisses me off.”
Before the protest, the Salt Lake City School District sent a message to parents saying that while students have a First Amendment right to express themselves, if they leave campus, they will be marked absent. They encouraged students to stay in class. This is the second Friday in a row that some students in the district have walked out in protest.
“Student walkouts that occur during the school day are not school- or district-sanctioned, interfere with instructional time, and lead to missed learning opportunities,” the district said in a statement.
Other districts with protests sent similar messages, saying that they couldn’t stop students from demonstrating and emphasizing that they weren’t encouraging the protests.
Salt Lake City Council member Eva Lopez Chavez spoke at the East High protest. Other adults in the community stood nearby to help the students protest safely. They kept them out of the street and had water.
There has been some opposition to the student protests, especially online. One truck intentionally belched black smoke — coal rolling — as it drove by the East High students. In Magna, a man was arrested after allegedly threatening to shoot student protestors, according to ABC4.
Utah Education Association President Renée Pinkney has been teaching for 30 years and told KUER she couldn’t remember student protests of this magnitude ever in Utah. A few officials at various districts told KUER something similar: They’ve never seen something like this in Utah.
At East High, Hernandez told the crowd, “We should be in our classrooms, learning, listening to our teachers. Instead, we're out here teaching you guys a lesson,” she said of adults.
Adrian Gutierrez, a sophomore at Freedom Preparatory Academy, protested ICE in Provo on Feb. 5. Since the Trump administration started its immigration crackdown, Gutierrez said, he sees fewer people walking around his community. He thinks that’s because they’re scared of ICE, a feeling he understands.
“I saw some ICE agents in Provo. And I was surprised, you know, because they moved so fast,” he said. “You never know when it can happen to you. It's really unexpected, you know. And it's just really sad, families getting separated.”
Gutierrez said he protested because he’s upset about young kids and hardworking people who haven’t committed a crime being targeted by federal immigration enforcement. Being in the U.S. without legal status is a civil, not criminal, offense.
“They put the hard work into it just for them to get kicked out like they're nothing,” Gutierrez said.
There are more student protests scheduled for next week.
