Iowa City Community School District students walked out of school Thursday in protest of ICE’s treatment towards immigrants. Following the walkout, a demonstration took place in front of the Old Capitol Museum on the University of Iowa Campus.
“It’s important that we step up for our immigrant neighbors when things are too unsafe for them to,” Sasha Ackerman ‘26. “We have the privilege to speak up and protest and be fairly safe doing it, so we should use it.”
The event, run entirely by students at Iowa City West High School, was attended by high school and middle school students, University of Iowa students, and members of the wider Iowa City community. The students staged a walkout from class and gathered at the University of Iowa Pentacrest around the lunch hour, called “Melt the ICE.”
“[Jack Overholt] came up to me in one of my classes because I’m a very political person,” West High junior Moss Stutsman, who helped organize the walkout, said. “They were like, ‘hey, I want to plan a protest. Can you help me?’ and I was honestly really honored.”
Stutsman said that planning the walkout took about a week. He and Overholt communicated over Instagram in order to arrange details about the protest, involve other students, and design posters and social media posts.
“It’s definitely very stressful, but I would do it tenfold just to get half this amount of people out here,” Stutsman said at the Old Capital Museum demonstration. “I am so proud of all these people. I’ve almost teared up like three times because I did not imagine all of these people would come out, to be quite honest.”
By protesting, Stutsman hopes to see “change to the justice system.”
“It’s not justice. It’s barely a system, to be quite honest,” he said.
Stutsman said that walkouts serve as starting points and “thinking pools” that allow other community members and people in positions of power to know how protestors feel. Almost all of his teachers put up posters promoting the walkout in their classrooms because they knew that other students would be interested, which allowed students with similar beliefs to join the walkout.
“I really think it’s the start of, ‘hey, you have community in thinking this. Now let’s go out and make change,’” he said.
Toby Morlan, a freshman at City High School, decided to participate in the walkout after learning about it from a friend who wanted to go. He had no idea that a protest was happening, but wanted to express his feelings in a public place and thought that Thursday was the best way to get involved.
“The more that I find out about [ICE’s actions], the more that I want to help prevent and stop it from happening [as much as a freshman from Iowa] possibly can,” Morlan said. “There’s just too much hate in the world right now.”
Although this was Morlan’s first time participating in a walkout or protest, he believes that they play a significant role in political participation, especially for younger people.
“Protests and walkouts are both important because as students, people don’t believe that we have a say in a lot of what goes on everywhere,” Morlan said. “But we have so much to say, because we are the future of our country.”
Morlan felt inspired to speak up because he was surrounded by people who felt the same way he did. At the Old Capital demonstration, he gave a speech denouncing ICE’s actions along with two of his friends, also high school students.
Worry about ICE presence—including rumours of activity in the Des Moines area a few weeks ago—remains in the public eye. But for students like Ackerman, Stutsman, and Morlan, actions like walkouts and protesting are the first step towards change.
“Someone said this at the protest: ‘if they’re not listening, just get louder and louder until all they can do is listen,’” Morlan said. “And that’s what we, as a people, as the younger generation, need to project and let them know.”
A version of this story originally appeared in the Iowa City Press-Citizen on February 6.
