Student and employee walkouts were beginning late Friday morning across the Bay Area, part of a national wave of protests against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and the deaths of two people this month at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis.
High school and college students in Oakland, Berkeley, Concord, San Jose and San Mateo all planned to walk away from their classes Friday, according to posts on social media. They were among scores of similar protests being held in nearly every state across the nation, organized by a website called nationalshutdown.org, which called for an end to ICE funding and a stop to the agency’s “terror” campaign.
The walkouts follow a similar wave of school and work stoppages a week ago in Minneapolis, where President Donald Trump dispatched thousands of federal immigration agents in one of the largest immigration crackdowns of his year-old second term. The subsequent deaths of two people — Minneapolis mother Renee Good and ICU nurse Alex Pretti — at the hands of federal agents this month has led to renewed protests against Trump’s immigration policies, recently prompting the Department of Homeland Security to begin moving some agents out of the region.
Already this week, hundreds of students walked out of classes in the East Bay and the South Bay in protest of ICE’s actions.
Alejandra Argueta, a 17-year-old senior at El Camino High School, was among the students who walked out of class Friday and joined a protest in South San Francisco.
Argueta said she felt compelled to participate because staying silent was not an option.
“Just because it’s not happening to you doesn’t mean you’re supposed to sit back and watch everything unfold,” she said, adding that while the Bay Area may feel more insulated than other parts of the country, she said “it’s only a matter of time until things get worse.”
For Argueta, immigration enforcement and civil rights were her main concerns concerns.
She criticized deportations she said are being carried out without due process, particularly those involving families and children. “They said they were only going to deport criminals, but as we can see they’re deporting little people — including little children,” she said. “There’s no way that children who haven’t even gotten to middle school are criminals.”
Check back for updates to this developing story.
The Mercury News
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