By 11:30 a.m., it seemed like Walter Johnson High School’s second anti-ICE walkout was to end in failure; the small group that had gathered in front of the school building paled in comparison to the crowd that had formed for the same cause just over a month earlier.
Then, Northwood arrived.
A large group of students from Northwood High School marched over a mile to Walter Johnson’s campus on Friday, March 13, joining with a much smaller group of WJ protesters in a demonstration against the mass raids and deportations recently conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The protesters carried homemade signs and banners as they marched along the sidewalk.
Using a megaphone and multiple speakers which students had brought from home, they started chants and played music – those sounds were soon met by the beeps of cars driving past.
Among the demonstrators from Northwood was Student Member of the Board (SMOB) candidate Leul Dawit, who had reached out to organizers from WJ just the night before to plan the event. Along with their anti-authoritarian and pro-immigration signs, several carried posters for his campaign.
A group of officers from the Montgomery County Police Department arrived shortly after, attempting to discourage the protesters from entering WJ’s campus.
Although they did not succeed in the attempt, they followed the students closely for the duration of the march, and were able to successfully redirect the crowd back across Rock Spring Drive after they crossed the street.
The protest coincided with a state-wide day of demonstration for the same cause which had been organized several weeks in advance. Many other schools around Montgomery County held walkouts at roughly the same time.
While not as dramatic as the first anti-ICE event on WJ’s campus, the demonstration stood out as a unique moment of solidarity between two schools within MCPS, and an example of effective student political organization.
Photos and multimedia curation by Jay Resnik