Students walked out of their classes on Tuesday, Jan. 20 to protest the Trump administration. The walkout came amid the escalating deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials in cities across the U.S., part of President Donald Trump’s militarized immigration enforcement efforts, which have included the fatal shootings of two American citizens by ICE agents in Minneapolis this month.

The students, many of whom are members of the recently formed Student Identity and Protection Alliance (SIPA), traveled via public transit to a protest dubbed the “Free America Walkout” on Forsyth Way near the Museum of Fine Arts.

“One year into Trump’s second regime, we face an escalating fascist threat,” Free America stated in its online advertisement. “A free America begins the moment we refuse to cooperate. This is not a request. This is a rupture. This is a protest and a promise. In the face of fascism, we will be ungovernable.”

The high schoolers carried signs denouncing Trump, ICE and “The 4th Reich” (a nod to perceived authoritarianism in the federal government). Their presence garnered applause from the largely college-age and older adult crowd.

SIPA is a student advocacy group organized in response to the school administration’s recent transition away from “Days of.” The group is dedicated to “protecting, elevating and empowering unheard student voices,” according to a post on SIPA’s Instagram account.

Junior and SIPA social media manager Dee Sosa said the walkout was one way of standing up for the immigrant community members they know and love. They said that SIPA’s independence from the high school (lacking an advisor and school funding) made the protest possible.

“[The walkout] is extremely educational. You’re learning and you’re fighting for your rights, which we don’t get to really do in school. They don’t let you leave to do things like this,” Sosa said. “So it’s a rebellion against our school system, against school systems everywhere, that students should be able to have the right to express themselves and not be confined to certain hours of the day [at school].”

Senior and SIPA president Echo Kaufman said walkouts are powerful because they require sacrifice.

“Everybody here cares about their education. Everybody cares about doing well in school,” Kaufman said. “I think a walkout symbolizes that that’s not enough. We need to be able to fight, and fighting is not a comfortable thing.”

Another protestor, senior Sunshine Messing, carried a sign reading, “People are dying. No more empty words.” She said modern-day politicians verbally condemn policies they oppose but fail to take action to enact concrete change.

“I’m done saying that’s enough,” Messing said. “We want real, actual material change, and we want results; we want people to stop dying. We don’t just want [politicians] to say the same words that we say.”

Though they said they could not dictate how any individual should take action on certain issues, Kaufman urged Brookline students to “bring about what [they] want in the world.” They said they often think of German pastor Martin Niemöller’s 1946 poem “First They Came,” which condemns German complicity during the Nazis’ rise to power.

“Nobody is really safe in a society where free thought and free expression [are] under attack,” Kaufman said. “Even if it is not your thought and expression right now, it can be. If you don’t speak up now, you won’t be able to speak up until it’s too late.”

Kaufman emphasized the importance of acting in solidarity for those affected by immigration policies.

“Even if it’s not personal to you, it’s personal to other people, and those are still people who are worthy of being fought for,” Kaufman added.

Sosa said they aimed to protect future generations of youth from having to deal with today’s problems.

“If we don’t start now, we’re just going to get into the habit of not ever speaking up,” Sosa said. “Then we’re going to do the same thing that older generations are doing, which is just saying, ‘Oh, the younger generations will take care of it.’”