Minnesota middle school school students find creative ways to protest ICE crackdown
By Jonah Kaplan
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CRYSTAL, Minnesota (WCCO) — When 300 students sing “Lift Every Voice,” it turns from an anthem into a call for positive action.
“I think if you use your voice the correct way than you can accomplish a lot more,” Zoraba Ross, principal of the FAIR School in Crystal, Minnesota, told WCCO News. “Walking out of the building is not something that I can authorize from a principal’s standpoint, but I can authorize something that is more positive in nature, and so I gave the kids a challenge to do something that was more positive.”
The students accepted that challenge too, coming together to protest the immigration crackdown by creating a paper “chain of love” that now hangs over the cafeteria.
On each paper is a message of encouragement or a name of a student from an immigrant family.
“I don’t think anybody should be scared to leave their homes and come to school,” sixth grader Brynn Halupnick, of the project’s organizers, lamented. “I’m going to remember those that have gone through this and think how this is something I would ever expect to go through. It’s way more than just my life. It’s other lives too.”
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