Kids: 1, ICE: 0
High school students and the power of protest
Reader: today we’re headed to Milford, Massachusetts, a little burg that occupies the part of my adopted home state known as ‘west of 495.’ The occasion for our vision: a rare good news story involving immigrants and ICE. Six days ago, ICE, which is less and less distinguishable from right-wing militia groups, grabbed high school student Marcelo Gomes da Silva en route to volleyball practice. That ICE was after the student’s father, and Marcelo has no criminal record (wasn’t that supposed to be the point??) made no difference. He was thrown into a windowless holding cell in a packed detention center, a concrete floor and a foil blanket for a bed.
Then something pretty amazing happened. The town rose up in protest, starting with the high school graduation ceremony, which turned into a 1000-strong demonstration at Milford Town Hall. Then, the next day, hundreds of students walked out of Milford High, chanting “Free Marcelo.” On t-shirts, banners, and in videos online, that became their signature demand. Marcelo’s volleyball teammates dedicated their tournament game to him, spiking, setting and doing whatever else volleyball players do while wearing white shirts calling for “Justice 4 Mar” and “Free Marcelo.”
And it worked. Yesterday, a federal judge ordered Marcelo’s release. The kids were there too, by the way—including dozens of volleyball players all wearing Marcelo’s #10. Thanks to some incredible organizing, Marcelo is home again, and back amongst his friends. But everything has changed. While Marcelo’s girlfriend planned to take him straight to the local Dairy Queen for a hot-fudge brownie sundae (excellent choice!), he had a more urgent priority: telling the world about the conditions in the detention center. “I don’t want to cry but I want to say that that place, it’s not good,” Marcelo told the crowd. The students who pushed so hard for his release have been transformed too. A week ago they were ‘Scarlet Hawks,’ counting down the days till the end of the school year. Today they’re activists.
So what have we learned?
As I’ve been arguing in these pages, students are a major vulnerability for Trump’s immigration policy. It’s not a coincidence that the most effective examples of resistance to the administration’s ever-expanding immigration dragnet have involved students and schools. See, for example, the story of tiny Sackets Harbor, NY, where teachers and admistrators successfully rescued a family from ICE:
They engineered a stunningly sophisticated 11-day media and influence campaign, enlisting immigration attorneys and advocates, village residents and national media in the family’s cause. While powerful law firms and universities sought shelter from White House attacks, a tiny school fought back and, improbably, won.
Something similar has been playing out in Milford over the past week. But the fact that both of these stories involved students is essential. You see, however the Trump Administration may want to define “illegal,” Americans remain deeply uncomfortable with the idea of punishing children for actions taken by their parents. Marcelo, for example, arrived in the US from Brazil when he was just six. In fact, it’s unclear whether he was even aware that he lacked legal status. By Massachusetts’ standards, Milford is a ‘red’ town—Harris/Walz eked out a win here in 2024—but it’s increasingly clear that voters across the spectrum draw the line at snatching kids.
ICE has a tarnished brand
In just the past few weeks, ICE has been everywhere in Massachusetts, including on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, where they rounded up immigrant workers, none of whom seem to have had criminal records either, whisking them off the islands, onto ferries, and then into detention centers. Or how about this one in New Bedford, where ICE agents used a sledge hammer to smash a car window and drag out a Guatemalan immigrant who was on his way to the dentist. He’s been released by the way, after a loud public outcry. All this is to say that ICE isn’t exactly winning over new supporters to the cause. (The white supremacist tattoos probably aren’t helping.) At a press conference announcing that ICE agents have rounded up 1,500 Massachusetts residents, the leader of Operation Patriot declared that “We’re going to keep coming back.” Perhaps, but the opposition is going to keep getting bigger.
Civil rights are the real target
The Trump Administration wants to redefine students like Marcelo Gomes da Silva as criminals, but it’s also intent on rolling back their access to public education. Trump’s budget is explicit about seeking to cut off opportunities for children and their families who come from other countries. On the chopping block: funding to help immigrant students learn English, funding for the children of migrant workers who, and funding for adult education, which serves a heavily immigrant population. In a recent op-ed for the Boston Globe, former Lowell High School teacher Jessica Lander, author of the fantastic book, Making Americans, reminds us that Trump’s real goal is to overturn Plyler vs. Doe, the landmark SCOTUS case extending the ‘equal protections’ of the 14th Amendment to undocumented students. Writes Lander:
Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who authored the court’s 1982 decision, wrote that denying undocumented students access to education would impose a “lifetime hardship” that would be harmful to children and to the “progress of our nation.”
Creating a permanent underclass seems like a pretty odious side effect, unless, of course, you happen to view rigid race/class hierarchies as not just natural but desirable.
The kids are alright
In the most recent episode of Have You Heard, we interviewed Derek Black about why so much of the Trump Administration’s firepower has been aimed at public education. It’s a fantastic conversation if I do say so. Derek, a constitutional legal scholar, is among the most forceful advocates for student civil rights that we have and has been leading the charge against the anti-DEI ‘loyalty oaths’ that Trump’s Department of Education is trying to force on states and school districts. He’s also an expert on the period leading up the Civil War, a moment that turns out to have some uncanny parallels to our own season of paranoia and power grabs. In fact, one of the key lessons of Derek’s amazing new book, Dangerous Learning: the South’s Long War Against Black Literacy, is that heavy-handed efforts to quash dissent often end up producing more of it, seeding resistance in the process.
I’ve been thinking about that as I’ve watched the protests in Milford this week. By grabbing a high school student, ICE gave young people a crash course in politics and the power of protest. And it’s a lesson that these students aren’t going to forget. “Our children are experiencing this in real time,” Derek told me. “And if these autocrats don't think these young people are going demand a different future for their children than the ones that they are leading their own children through, they're crazy.”
Update: after I wrote this piece I came across a quote from a classmate of Marcelo’s that speaks to the dynamic I’ve been describing. Amani Jack told the AP that Marcelo’s absence loomed large over Milford High’s graduation ceremony because he should have been playing in the band, not locked up in an ICE jail. Jack said that if she had a chance to speak with the president, she’d ask him to “put yourself in our shoes.”
“He did say he was going to deport criminals,” she said. “Marcelo is not a criminal. He’s a student. I really want him to take a step in our shoes, witnessing this. Try and understand how we feel. We’re just trying to graduate high school.”
Day in and day out, Trump and his allies are making the case that Americans shouldn’t feel empathy towards [add example of undesireable here.] Whether that effort succeeds or fails will ultimately depend upon all of us. These brave students in Milford just showed us how it’s done.