In a world where polarization breaks our nation apart, it is especially important to remember that human rights should always center our advocacy, no matter left or right, red or blue. For thousands of high schoolers in the Bay Area, it was the erosion of these Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights that ignited the Jan. 31 walkout—because documented or not, the names behind the statistics are people first.
High schoolers are often told to wait their turn, but if injustice doesn’t, why should we? It is hard for teens to make much of an impact on real-world policies (and easy for our protests to be dismissed as naïve or performative). But when federal policies become so real in our daily educational lives, watching teachers and friends being torn from classes or hidden on campus, silence turns into complacency.
The least we can do is skip our own classes to teach the federal government a lesson as their immigration acts on Capitol Hill start infiltrating our classrooms, neighborhoods and lunch tables.
At the same time, it is deeply unsettling that political disruption feels necessary at all. I recognize the privilege embedded in our protest—how lucky we are to live and learn in a community where dissent is not immediately criminalized, to know our “sanctuary state” perspectives reside with the majority and will be supported, and to believe that our voices will be heard. We are blessed to live in a town where walking out of school does not put us at risk of not seeing our parents that evening. Coming home at the end of the day is taken as an assumption rather than a hope. I deeply fear an America where this ability to exercise our rights is considered a privilege.
I am certain that many will report on the demonstrations themselves, so what I want to focus on instead is what precipitated them; understanding the rhetoric that animates these immigration raids is crucial to understanding why this moment feels so frightening, even for a student not immediately threatened by the risk of deportation. Danger lies in the language that frames immigration raids—language that rebrands force as protection and cruelty as necessity.
While most students in Palo Alto leave campus knowing they will be home in time for dinner, across our nation, families live under the constant threat of sudden removal, enforced not purely through action, but through narrative.
From the insulated chambers of Washington D.C., the White House projects propaganda that dehumanizes, simplifies and attempts to justify the separation of families. It is disheartening to see how powerless and fearful many Americans are, as they are completely at the mercy of an almost authoritarian regime. The current administration tears lives apart and scatters them across the globe from the safety of their weapon-protected offices in D.C. and the shield of screens as they spread destructive rhetoric on the media; this is governance conducted from a distance.
Having grown up hearing the political messaging of BLM, and now, witnessing yet another demonstration of state powers against the sovereignty of Main Street, some parallels are made strikingly clear: in both cases, governmental extensions assert themselves violently against civilian life while insisting on their own benevolence, even when it means blatantly lying to the public.
As history reminds us with moments such as the Reconstruction Era, the normalization of such logic rarely ends where it begins; the danger is not only in policy but in the stories told to justify it.
When federal protections for newly freed Black Americans were gradually undermined, it was done under the rhetoric of “order,” “security” and “states’ rights.” During Reconstruction, violence and disenfranchisement were reframed as restoration, and once this logic was normalized, it calcified into decades of legally sanctioned inequality. The most insidious shift was not immediate brutality, but the acceptance of a narrative that made brutality seem reasonable; in a parallel manner, today, the most dangerous weapon in Trump’s status quo is not force, but the framing of discourse.
No matter what side of the political spectrum, we need to at least put the fundamentals of human dignity at the front of our ballots; we cannot endorse and encourage a leader who puts violence, exclusion and fear above all else. Those who believe in strong national security must recognize that they cannot, in good conscience, align themselves with the murder of civilians and abduction of families; the conversation around deportation policies in 2026 has become less about the controversy of immigration, but one closer to basic morality. We must keep putting one foot in front of the other, no matter what form it takes.
Democracy is sustained by the collective memory that surrounds it, and I refuse to allow America to tell—or even accept—a story of hatred and governmental brutality, authored in fear.