Tens of thousands of students walked out of classrooms all across the Bay Area on Friday, joining hundreds of thousands across the country in demanding justice for the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents, and an end to the daily brutality in Minnesota and nearly everywhere else that ICE has been deployed. In San Francisco, students from every high school (and many middle schools and universities) in the city were represented at a thousands-strong rally in Dolores Park, standing in solidarity with those targeted by Trump’s racist, anti-immigrant and anti-worker agenda of repression. Handmade signs blazed with slogans of solidarity with immigrants and anti-ICE activists; thousands joined chants calling for the abolition of ICE. Dozens of businesses also closed, some out of genuine solidarity, others forced to close due to pressure from their workers.
What this moment shows is the deep unpopularity of Trump’s deportation agenda and the willingness of students and workers to speak out against it, despite round the clock efforts of propagandists like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem to make anyone who speaks up a terrorist. When faced with the full weight of the federal government, it is easy to feel hopeless. But the people of Minnesota have shown us how strong we can be when we stand together. Actions like Friday’s demonstrations show that we are not alone in our outrage against this system. It is up to all of us to keep this momentum going forward, until this government cannot afford to ignore us, until they are forced to put an end to to ICE’s machinery of surveillance and deportation, until we are finally able to dismantle the system that created all of this and replace it with a future that values lives over profits and people over borders!
