Cars drove back and forth across Main Street bridge on Feb. 11 in downtown Green Bay, showing off for the crowd of students. Flags, both American and Mexican, flapped in the wind, while the smell of exhaust grew ever stronger.
On each pass, students pulled themselves out passenger-side windows and stood up in truck beds, raising signs as they did.
“It’s a beautiful day to melt ICE,” one read.
“Abolish ICE,” read another. “It’s cold enough!”
At least 200 Green Bay high school students exchanged hallways for roadways and pencils for protest signs Feb. 11 in a planned walkout to protest federal immigration enforcement.
“What [ICE] is doing is completely wrong,” junior Yaretzy Reyes Bautista said. “They shouldn’t just be taking people. The violence is just way too much.”
Students came together after an Instagram post about a potential walkout spread like wildfire, they said.
At 12:30 p.m., teens started to wind around downtown Green Bay. An hour after the walkout began, they gathered on Ray Nitschnke Memorial Bridge, looking a few hundred strong. A couple students said that they were mostly there to skip school, but nearly everyone spoke out against federal immigration action, mostly in reference to federal actions in Minneapolis.
Junior Aniya Starks said the detainment of Liam Ramos, a 5-year-old Minneapolis boy, was “not right.” Junior Belle Thal has family in Minnesota, she said, and her grandfather is in Minneapolis. While her family members are legal citizens, including her grandfather, he’s still too nervous to leave the house.
“That’s why I’m out here,” Thal said. “I’m here because my family are immigrants, and I’m standing for everything my family stands for right now.”
Thal and fellow junior Keloen Martinez said they wanted to represent their generation, to prove that they want, and are willing to work for, a better future.
What drove them to protest “is an overall sense of wanting to make this country better, and just really wanting our voices heard as the younger generation,” Martinez said.
Asani, a senior, said he feels like federal immigration officers are taking away people’s freedom. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shouldn’t be “attacking people,” he said. He declined to give his last name.
Some worried about ICE officers coming to Green Bay. They said they’d heard officers were already in town, “looking for specific people, specifically people of color.”
Brown County Jail had housed 61 federal ICE detainees as of early December , with about a third having been arrested on local criminal charges. As of Jan. 15, the Green Bay Police Department and Brown County Sheriff’s Office were not aware of any ICE activity in the city or county, although ICE agents don’t have to let these agencies know when they’re in the area.
As for missing school, Green Bay School District administrators said they acknowledged students’ First Amendment rights, but that students would be considered absent and unexcused unless a parent called to excuse them.
Still, students like sophomore Michael Chapman and junior Kamira Robinson said they felt that ICE doesn’t have a place in Green Bay.
Contact Green Bay education reporter Nadia Scharf at nscharf@usatodayco.com or on X at @nadiaascharf.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: About 200 Green Bay high school students walk out to protest ICE
Reporting by Nadia Scharf, Green Bay Press-Gazette / Green Bay Press-Gazette
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