On Friday, February 13, 2026, at 1:40 p.m., an estimated 1,000 students met in the cafeteria at Lafayette before walking out of school to exercise their First Amendment rights as an act of protest against the actions of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
ICE is a U.S. federal agency created in 2003 to enforce immigration laws. According to ice.gov, the mission of ICE is to “protect America from the cross-border crime and illegal immigration that threaten national security and public safety.” Recently, the role of ICE has been enhanced under the Trump Administration by Executive Order 12159. The main purpose of this executive order was to enforce the nation's immigration laws. This had led to ICE having an increased presence in many left-leaning cities, especially Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Protests against ICE started back in June of 2025, but the public took greater notice after the killing of Renée Good, a 37-year-old woman who was shot by ICE agents on Jan. 7, 2026, while trying to leave in her car. Soon after, on Jan. 24, 2026, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, was tackled down to the ground before getting shot by ICE agents. Both of these deaths took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Lafayette was not the first or only school to do this; schools such as Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, Tates Creek High School, Bryan Station High School, Henry Clay High School, Frederick Douglass High School, and Winburn Middle School participated in the nationwide walkouts that started in Minnesota.
Many of the students walked out with signs saying a variety of things like “ICE has killed 8, are we great again?”, “ICE is inhumane”, “Hot girls melt ICE”, and “My parents didn’t flee a dictator to join another” depicting the Colombian flag below it. These signs were accompanied by a variety of chants, such as “bella caio,” which translates to “goodbye beautiful,” and “I say ICE, you say OUT,” that echoed through the school campus and neighboring streets.
After a number of similar walkouts took place in the state of Texas, Gov. Greg Abbot threatened to strip funding from school districts where walkouts occurred, stating that, “Schools and staff who allow this behavior should be treated as co-conspirators” in a social media post discussing the walkouts. However, this did not deter students from continuing walkouts, and legal experts stated that the threatened consequences go “beyond routine punishment”.
Lafayette sophomore Leah Collins stated, “Being a part of it made me feel like I wasn’t just watching things happen, but rather taking a stand for what I think is right”. Walkouts are an important way that students can take a stand and have a role in politics, even though they are still teenagers. This walkout was an example of students exercising their First Amendment right to show their disagreement with the actions of ICE.
