LA and OC Students Walk Out Against ICE Operations

High school students across Los Angeles and Orange Counties walked out of class on February 6, organizing coordinated campus protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations that have rattled immigrant communities throughout Southern California and beyond.

Students from Orange County School of the Arts, Fullerton Union High School, Hart High School in Santa Clarita, Cerritos High School, Whitney High School, Artesia High School in Lakewood, and several other campuses participated. Several local middle schools joined as well. The walkouts were independently organized at each campus but unified around a single demand: the abolition of ICE.

The protests came in response to what students described as a surge in violent immigration enforcement, including detentions they said had directly touched their schools and families. Footage of ambush-style arrests circulating on social media amplified the anxiety among students who in many cases already know classmates or neighbors who have been detained.

At OCSA in Santa Ana, Visual Arts Conservatory senior Pilar Rivera delivered an original poem at her campus walkout. “One day, you’ll look around, notice who built your roads, who cleaned your homes, who picked your food, who kept your cities alive, and you’ll want us back,” Rivera said. “You call this safety, you call this protection, but the danger was never us. The danger was the hate you chose instead of the truth.”

OCSA junior Sophia Zavala pushed back directly at adults who questioned whether students understood what they were protesting. “Adults forget that we are the generation who attended ‘Zoom School’ while collectively battling a global pandemic, can execute school shooting lockdown protocol with our eyes closed, and have prepared final texts on the ready to send our families in case we are caught in one,” Zavala said. “We navigate the resurgence of campus and community racism after George Floyd’s murder, all while studying for AP exams, SATs, attending extracurriculars, meeting volunteer quotas, and writing killer college application essays. Did they think we would just look away when ICE came for our friends and neighbors?”

That question captures something the walkouts made visible. These students are not reacting impulsively. The logistics alone reflect serious organizing capacity. At OCSA, student organizers mapped a specific march route designed to end at the steps of the Ronald Reagan Santa Ana Federal Building, a choice that carried clear symbolic weight.

Some parents and school administrators reportedly questioned the students’ motivations, suggesting outside influence or political manipulation. The evidence on the ground cut against that reading. Student speeches and spoken word performances carried the weight of personal experience, not borrowed talking points. Many of the young organizers have watched family members or community figures get picked up by federal agents. Others have not experienced detention directly but have absorbed the psychological toll of watching it happen in their neighborhoods, sometimes near their own school entrances.

What made February 6 notable was not just the size of the turnout but the coordination. Students from different campuses, different cities, and different school cultures synchronized their actions without centralizing control. Each school ran its own walkout. Each had its own speakers, its own route, its own energy. The shared cause held it together.

For Southern California, where immigrant labor has shaped agriculture, construction, food service, and domestic work for generations, the students’ message was pointed and specific. Rivera’s poem didn’t traffic in abstraction. It named the work, named the workers, and named the cost of pretending otherwise.

The walkouts did not produce any immediate policy response. What they did produce was a visible, articulate show of force from a generation that grew up with pandemic schooling, active shooter drills, and social media footage of people being detained in the streets. They have been told, in various ways, to stay in their lane. On February 6, several thousand of them declined.