Why Walk Out?

Student Guest Opinion

In the sea of cardboard signs that read “MELT ICE,” “DEFUND ICE NOW,” and “IMMIGRANTS ARE HUMANS TOO,” students at Interlochen Arts Academy (IAA) joined in on the nationwide protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Minnesota killings.

IAA is one of the northern Michigan high schools that participated in a campus walkout against the murders in Minnesota, like Traverse City West and Traverse City Central. For IAA’s protest, over 100 out of 500 students showed up outside Corson Auditorium with signs and speakers, walking out of their 11am classes. Protestors handed out printed QR codes that led to GoFundMe pages for “communities affected by ICE” and email templates to contact state representatives.

For IAA, this protest was incredibly important, as about 20 percent of the student body is international. And while kids from abroad who are legally residing in the United States may not seem like ICE’s victims, it’s a reality many international students have had to face.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a nonpartisan data distribution organization that was founded in 1989 at Syracuse University, publishes immigration statistics within the United States. Since Nov. 30, 2025, the Trump Administration has held about 65,735 people in detention centers.

However, TRAC research shows 48,377 people out of that number have no criminal record whatsoever. That’s about 73 percent of detained people. Even the rest of the percentage—the ones with the criminal record—usually have “committed only minor offenses, including traffic violations,” writes TRAC.

It becomes even more worrying, as the Trump Administration seems to have no qualms about detaining children, either.

According to The Marshall Project—a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that focuses on criminal justice and was founded by Neil Barsky in 2014—there are an average of 170 children held in ICE’s detention centers a day.

Since Trump took office, over 3,800 kids have been held in detention centers, many for over 20 days, “a court-ordered limit on child detention,” explains The Marshall Project.

So for international students, the threat of being taken away and deported is completely real and incredibly frightening.

“The growth of ICE raids has struck fear in not only me, but a lot of other students—[specifically] with how ICE has been operating,” says an international student from IAA, who has chosen to stay anonymous due to the threat of being deported. “As we all come from such diverse backgrounds, I think that’s one of the reasons why we’re so sensitive to news related to the raids.”

On the subject of being deported, the student tells me, “We [international students] might joke around it, but I feel like some part of it is fear that it’ll happen to ourselves. We’re still in the middle of nowhere, but with how rumors have gone around…I’ve been more worried about the possibility of it happening.”

“The walkout is important because it’s one way for us to show solidarity with the national community, and it’s the easiest first step we can take to raise awareness to current national issues to the wider campus community.” Then they add, “It also gave us a platform to share our own voices about what we felt about current events, which is really precious considering how isolated we are.”

For someone who isn’t an international student, protesting ICE is a completely different experience. Yusef Henry, a senior classical double bassist at IAA who chose to be known by name “because there are individuals who don’t have the privilege of showing their face,” believes in fighting for the rights of international students at IAA.

“The importance of this walkout was to educate the students of IAA, show support for the international students, and to make sure everybody knows this is a national strike,” says Henry. Protesters also refused to buy anything on Jan. 30 to “withhold their money from the American economy.”

“I’m hoping this walkout shows the severity of this situation to those who feel impartial to it,” Henry says. “We as a society have become so devoid of empathy it’s a rare thing now. Too many people are accustomed to seeing oppression and doing nothing. We must have empathy and call upon that empathy for courage.”

Every day, teens are subject to harrowing news headlines and fact-checks on fast-paced media sites and apps, making the “oppression” Henry references feel like a part of daily life. Henry says this was one of the reasons IAA students decided to walkout with the rest of the nation during the strike. While students at IAA can live in a bubble—of media or of the separation of boarding school life—protesting and making voices heard is part of being a student there. To Henry, being an artist means stepping up and saying something.

More broadly, students protesting all around the nation are doing so for similar reasons: to defund ICE and get justice for those murdered in Minnesota and elsewhere, to show that immigrants are humans with rights, and to prove that speaking up does make a difference.

Quinn De Vecchi is a creative writing senior at Interlochen Arts Academy.

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