Three taken to hospital, police say

A student walkout that drew hundreds to La Alma-Lincoln Park on Friday to protest federal immigration enforcement turned violent, with police reporting five assaults and three people taken to the hospital.

As the crowd swelled, confrontations broke out between students and counterprotesters. In one, students threw water on a man wearing a red MAGA hat and face covering who carried an “I love ICE” sign before taking the sign and ripping it up.

A woman whom The Denver Gazette could not immediately identify had her hair pulled and was punched in the face.

Denver police reported five assaults among demonstrators in the park. Three people were taken to the hospital with injuries whose severity was not immediately known.

Officers identified multiple suspects and said the investigations are ongoing. Police also cited two people for graffiti.

Just before noon, students started trickling in to La Alma-Lincoln Park.

“Colorado students have a right to go to school and feel safe,” said Bre Kennedy, a 16-year-old junior at Grandview High School in Aurora. “I hope that adults in power can look at this and see how many students care about this issue and came together to fight this.”

Some of the students who skipped class to attend the demonstration carried signs comparing ICE to the KKK and the Gestapo.

More than 160 schools across the state had been expected to participate in the walkout protesting immigration enforcement by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Trump administration, according to the Colorado Youth Coalition, which organized the demonstration.

Kennedy said she hopes the demonstration sends a clear message: ICE is not welcome in Colorado schools and communities. Students recounted stories of friends being detained by ICE.

No ICE raid of a school campus had been reported in Colorado since the Trump administration’s campaign to deport a historic number of people illegally staying in the U.S. There have been ICE raids conducted in other places — but not at churches or schools.

Others — like Dale Abad-Perez, a junior at Green Mountain High School at Jeffco Public Schools — decried ICE’s tactics, including officers wearing masks and obscuring their identities.

“That isn’t a peace officer,” Abad-Perez said.

School districts along the Front Range that The Denver Gazette contacted generally said students have a right to protest, but leaving class to participate does not necessarily give them an excused absence.

Cherry Creek School District, where Kennedy attends school, told families that students who left class would be marked unexcused. The district provided a designated place on campus for students who wanted to demonstrate and said disciplinary consequences would apply only if students violated the district’s code of conduct.

In other words, participating in the protest was not itself grounds for discipline, but it did not erase the missed class time.

“While the Cherry Creek School District does not endorse walkouts, we respect students’ First Amendment rights,” district officials said in an email to families Friday. “If a walkout occurs, our priority will be supervision, safety, and maintaining a functional learning environment for all students.”

While state education dollars follow students in Colorado, Friday’s absences are not expected to affect school funding.

State funding is based largely on the fall student enrollment, rather than on daily attendance.

“Because of that, events occurring during the second semester, such as the Jan. 30 protests, would not affect a district’s funding,” Jeremy Meyer, a spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Education, said in an email. “A canceled day in September also would not affect funding.”

It was unclear Friday whether any schools canceled classes because of the walkout or whether any teachers encouraged students to participate.

Student walkouts have a long history in the United States. Young people protested government policies and actions — notably segregation and the Vietnam War. More recently, student protesters sought to claim heritage from those protests, while others argued the activism then and now are not the same.

Too young to vote, high school students have fewer avenues for political participation, said Maryam Jamshidi, a law professor at the University of Colorado Law School.

“Students are usually acting as part of a broader movement,” Jamshidi said, noting the wider pushback against the Trump administration’s policies.

It would be a mistake to dismiss Friday’s walkout as simply an excuse to skip school, said Hava Rachel Gordon, a sociologist at the University of Denver.

Nor, Gordon said, is it possible to know yet what effect Friday’s demonstrations will ultimately have.

“Even if they don’t affect policy, their activism sometimes influences cultural change,” Gordon said.

Gordon pointed to the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that swept college campuses two years ago. Their broader cultural impact, she said, did not become apparent immediately — an example of why the significance of a student protest cannot necessarily be measured on the day it occurs.

College students at universities across Denver and the country erected encampments as part of a pro-Palestinian movement that demanded universities divest from companies doing business in Israel, end some study-abroad programs and sever other financial ties.

The protests in Colorado and elsewhere in the United States set off a fierce debate over the boundaries of free speech, drew allegations of antisemitism and put university administrations under intense scrutiny. The protests were a response to the war that Israel launched after Hamas struck its southern region, killed 1,200 people and kidnapped hundreds more.

Earlier this year, thousands of Colorado students also took to the streets to protest the Trump administration following an immigration enforcement crackdown in Minnesota.

The students Friday garnered the support of Melat Kiros, the Democratic nominee for Colorado’s 1st Congressional District, who spoke at the gathering and told students she was proud of the stand they took.

Kiros told the students that their age — and for many, their inability to vote — did not mean they were powerless.

“This is how you change things,” Kiros said.