Moscow High School students walked out of class Monday morning to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement. About 60 students participated, chanting outside the school and carrying signs.
Basil Carter, 17, organized the protest alongside other students in the school’s human rights club.
He said Monday’s anti-ICE protest was bigger than a similar one held in protest of the Trump administration last year, and he thinks the public’s awareness of people who were killed by ICE officers is part of the reason why.
“ICE was always brutalizing innocent civilians,” he said. “But I think Alex Pretti and Renee Good and Keith Porter Jr., their deaths are known to the public now.”
Some said although they are not immigrants, they didn’t feel like they would be safe if immigrants’ civil rights were not protected. More than one student cited a famous quote by the German pastor Martin Niemöller that spoke about complicity with the Nazism.
Others said they worried about friends, family members and loved ones who they fear could be targeted by ICE.
“It really concerns me — the fact that I could be labeled, and my family could be labeled, as somebody that they're not — just because of where they're from,” said Asher Peterson, 17, addressing the crowd. “It's crazy to think that these wonderful people that I look up to and that I love so much could just be taken away like that.”
Arianna Brousseau, 16 said her family has been in the United States since the early 1900s, but that doesn’t necessarily make her feel safe.
“My dad, he's a lot darker. You can hardly tell with me, but he gets mistaken for Mexican a lot,” she said. “It worries me that maybe my dad will go missing one day, and I won't know why.”
Mckayla Gentry, 16, told the crowd she used to support ICE but no longer does.
“(My support) was out of a place of ignorance and not having the education to know what was really going on,” Gentry said. “Not being educated is not an excuse anymore. It's not okay to see these things happening on the news and just pass it off and pretend like it's not happening.”
The 64 students, counted by NWPB, account for about 8% of the school’s roughly 800-person student population.
Robert Bailey, a teacher at Moscow High School, said he was aware that other students wanted to protest but didn’t want an unexcused absence.
Shawn Tiegs, superintendent at Moscow Public Schools, said there were roughly 50 absences, 19 of which were unexcused, at the high school. Some students who participated do not have a class during the period the walkout took place, he said.
“Students protesting is as old as students have been around,” he said. “We’re here to educate kids, that’s why we have policies about attendance.”
Tiegs said in Idaho, parents or guardians are allowed to excuse absences based on what they believe is best for their child, and the school district allows them two days to do so — though a new bill in the Idaho Legislature might bar schools from allowing excused absences for political protest in the future.
“We as a district absolutely respect the parents’ right to make decisions for their minor,” Tiegs said.
Some students accepted unexcused absences, which can result in disciplinary action if a certain number accrue.
Carter said he felt speaking up against civil rights violations and violence by ICE agents was more important than an unexcused absence.
“We deserve to be heard just as much as the next person,” Carter said. “The youth are living in an era that you are not experiencing in the same way, because perspective is a giant fishbowl … I urge people to go outside of that fishbowl and experience other perspectives.”
The walkout drew some spectators and debaters. That included the controversial Christ Church pastor, Doug Wilson, who has ties to the Trump administration and promotes Christian theocracy. Wilson could be heard debating with the students but said he had just happened upon the protest while walking back to his office from the post office.
It also included about five students from New Saint Andrews, a downtown Moscow Christian college associated with Wilson’s church.
