Hundreds of Colorado students ditched class Friday to protest ICE. By the afternoon in Denver’s La Alma-Lincoln Park, the “walkout” looked a lot more like a street fight.
Denver police documented five assaults. Three people went to the hospital. Video from the scene shows a woman yanked by the hair and punched in the face. Independent reporters who tried to film it say they were jumped—one walked away with a black eye.
This wasn’t a handful of agitators crashing a peaceful gathering. Students from well over 100 schools across the state, organizers claimed more than 160 to 200 campuses left class at noon and poured into the park. Signs compared ICE agents to Nazis and the KKK. Some danced on an Israeli flag smeared with fake blood.
When a lone counter-protester showed up carrying an “I Love ICE” sign and wearing a MAGA hat, the crowd chased him, doused him with water bottles, ripped up his sign, and kept coming. One student later clocked him in the back of the head with a metal water bottle.
Police said the demonstration was unpermitted and had no safety plan. That “contributed to an unsafe environment,” according to the department. Officers identified multiple suspects. Investigations are ongoing. Two people were cited for graffiti. No mass arrests were announced by Friday evening.
Organizers from the Colorado Youth Coalition and allied groups framed the day as students demanding “dignity” and an end to immigration enforcement near schools. Adult speakers, including a Democratic state senator, were on hand. Organizers repeatedly told kids not to engage with counter-protesters. The kids engaged anyway.
A protest is a protest. Putting hands on the people covering it and on anyone who doesn’t chant the approved slogans is something else. The video doesn’t lie. The hospital numbers don’t either. Colorado’s classrooms just sent a few hundred kids into the street. Some of them came back with fists instead of signs.
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