Six Seattle public schools sheltered in place last week due to reported ICE activity in the area. Plainclothes officers were spotted trying to force their way into a grocery store in the University District early this month. A few weeks ago, a unionized teaching assistant at the University of Washington (UW) was allegedly terminated because they had a pending work authorization. They are a DACA recipient, in this country legally, and ran into manufactured obstacles and delays from the federal immigration office. It’s not a question of when ICE gets to Seattle, but of what we do now that they are here, trying to enter our schools. We can’t rely on school administrators to keep us safe: we need to get organized to kick ICE off our campuses, and out of our cities.
On January 23, in solidarity with the Minneapolis general strike, UW students, including myself, pulled together a walkout on campus in less than 72 hours. We demanded that the university reinstate the terminated TA, ban ICE and DHS recruiters from campus, place a moratorium on evictions from student housing, and utilize the existing campus-wide alert system to notify people of ICE presence in the area. We brought out almost 200 people, including a large number of union members, who came out in solidarity with their terminated coworker. This far surpassed our expectations, and multiple student groups reached out asking to collaborate on future actions.
The very next day, after the murder of Alex Pretti, a coalition of student groups at the University of Minnesota called for a nationwide shutdown on January 30, and we answered the call. We spent the week flyering, postering, and gathering student groups to endorse the event.
The walkout packed the Quad with around 700 people, including middle school and high school students from at least five different schools who called out sick with their classmates to attend the walkout. The crowd included many sectors of unionized workers at UW—dining hall employees, grad student workers, and librarians. Healthcare workers also joined the rally, including a contingent of medical researchers from a UW-affiliate clinic, led by a Socialist Alternative member who helped organize their sick-out. One unionized dining employee approached another SAlt member and asked how to organize a strike with her coworkers.
After some electric speeches, we marched to the administration building to rally and hand-deliver our demands to the university president. Some 200 students and workers filed into the building and filled the stairwells as we chanted. When we reached the president’s office, his chief of staff approached and told us to leave. For 15 minutes, we unsuccessfully tried to get a meeting with the president, by which time more than five armed police officers, including the UWPD chief of police, had shown up.
When it became clear we would not get to hand-deliver our demands, we left our protest signs at the door and took the rally back outside to update the rest of the crowd. In order for the university to even consider our demands, it was clear we needed to place a lot more pressure on the administration by disrupting business as usual at UW. It’s going to take widespread strike action, as we’ve seen in Minneapolis.
We directed people to the next day’s rally organized by the Seattle Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, as well as our Seattle-wide organizing meeting the following week. The agitational energy of the protest was fantastic, and we were able to capture it and put forward real next steps.
Student protesters and young people hitting the streets have historically played a key role in movements that won massive gains for the workers and the oppressed, energizing the struggle and helping it spread. The Vietnam War protests, France’s 1968 General Strike, the Civil Rights Movement, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street all come to mind. However, students can’t change society on our own: we need the strength of the organized working class to halt the flow of profits, which is what the billionaires are actually afraid of.
In the fight against Trump’s deportation machine, students can lead the way in shutting down schools and college campuses. We should draw all school workers into this fight, and call on their unions to organize what is needed to shut down ICE: a nationwide strike. Workers hold the true lever of power, because we create profits for the ruling class, and more fundamentally, keep the world functioning. We all have an interest in fighting for a world free from oppression, where WE collectively decide how to run society in the interests of humanity and the planet.