Bre Kennedy is a junior at Grandview High School in Aurora. She started a student group this year called the Colorado Youth Coalition, and the walkout began the way things do at sixteen: an Instagram post listing twenty schools, 200,000 views, a flood of messages, and twenty schools became two hundred. She told the Colorado Sun what the post came from.

“It’s honestly so sickening to come home from school, open my phone and see just terrible, terrible stories online of families getting separated and children getting deported and kidnapped by ICE.”

Here is what the adults did. In January 2025, Trump’s Homeland Security Department threw out the policy that had kept ICE away from schools, churches, and hospitals.

A week before the walkout, ICE agents were seen detaining a man on College Avenue in Fort Collins. And Aurora, where Kennedy goes to school, is the city Trump spent the fall of 2024 calling a gang-occupied war zone. The kids who live there noticed.

“Being a kid, people say, ‘Oh, you can’t be into politics. You’re too young. You can’t vote. Your voice doesn’t matter.’ I think kids are tired of hearing that.”

When the students tried to march into the street, Denver police told them it was an unlawful assembly and to disperse. State Senator Julie Gonzales, who had come to support them, redirected them onto the sidewalks, and they went around the park chanting “No hate, no fear.” Someone with a megaphone kept shouting “Stay in unison.” They stayed in unison.

Not all of it was clean. An adult in a MAGA hat walked into the park twice with an “I heart ICE” sign. Students chased him, threw water bottles, and tore up the sign, and Denver police reported five assaults or altercations and three people taken to hospitals.

No one was arrested. It happened, it shouldn’t have, and it was a handful out of thousands. Kirrabella Cruz, 16, of East High, gave the man a wide berth with her friends because, she said, they’d rather keep it safe. She had come for her great-grandparents.

“I’m pretty sure they’d be disappointed to know that people are getting deported when they only wanted to live the American Dream.”

Zariah, 17, said the thing the whole afternoon was for: “I want people to understand that this isn’t normal.”

“Colorado students have a right to go to school and feel safe.” It took a sixteen-year-old to say it, in the city Trump called a war zone, to an administration that took the one policy keeping ICE away from schools and threw it away.