The Dignity in Schools Campaign stands in active community with students, parents, organizers and activists in Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, Santa Fe and all across the country. We can’t say for certain if Alex Pretti or Renee Good, like Silverio Villegas González and Keith Porter before them, would all still be alive today if not for the rampant gangsterism currently (and continuously) marauding through Black and Brown communities. But we do know for a fact that interactions with ICE ended each of their lives. We know they weren’t the aggressors. We know that these agents continue to gleefully abuse the most basic of human rights and we know they are encouraged to do so. Thanks to community members bravely bearing witness and documenting, we know the details surrounding each of these fatal encounters. 32 others lost their lives while in ICE custody in 2025. Countless others have been tased, tackled, tripped, doxxed, zip-tied, pushed, kettled, hit, shot, and databased. Students are being harassed, kidnapped and disappeared right alongside their parents and loved ones.
How will this period be written about in history books for the next generation?
None of this is inevitable, but how will our actions change any of it?
This is why book bans and curriculum wars are so central to their political project.
In the United States, the merry-go-round is clear; the deluded anxieties of the white and wealthy is sufficient justification for spectacles of white violence exercised on non-white people and those who try to protect them. This republic was founded in an attempt at birthing a propertied white heaven, and the conceptual apple has never strayed too far from its foundational tree. Without minimizing the significant horror they’re enacting; ICE is merely the latest iteration in a long “shock and awe” tradition of state-sponsored militarized force employed and deployed on both sides of the political spectrum to discipline working-class and racialized communities into acquiescence.
So of course there are no good schools, no meaningful education, no adequate teacher pay, no funding for SEL. No in-school medics, no counselors. No support staff. No music classes. No books. No libraries. No oversight. No community. No clean water. No affordable or healthy food. No decent jobs. No college without massive debt.
But there are more and more police. More and more prisons. More and more incarceration. More and more tear gas. But more and more bombs. But more and more surveillance. But more toxic data centers. But more war. But more and more people we’re instructed to hate.
Militarized intervention abroad, whether in DC, Caracas or Minneapolis has been used to normalize the actions of a fascist regime “in the name of “peacekeeping” here, “nation building” there; used to bring terror everywhere. ICE and the Trump administration are attempting to make us question what we see with our own eyes, the media we consume, saying that “the social media videos are not accurate” and pushing a disgusting and violent yet not surprising, “it was her fault” narrative to the murder of Renee Nicole Good. Furthermore, fascism relies on the continual erasure, plundering, and killing of Indigenous, Black and Brown peoples and cultures. It relies on symbolism so that it can obscure substance. It comes as no surprise that the murder of Keith Porter on New Year’s Eve, and many others, have received just as little corporate media attention as the horrid conditions of school buildings across the country.
We enthusiastically commend and support the thousands of students who continue to brave the elements to keep their friends and families safe. We support the walk-outs, the protests, the organizing and the relationship-building that has sustained the resistance to the tactics and brutality of a social order in terminal decline. Students are showing what we all must know, while there may not be a perfect society in our future; we can surely do better than this.
We insist that we will live, love, teach, organize, and build power for dignity in our schools, dignity in our neighborhoods, dignity in our homes, and dignity in our whole world. We will build the schools and educational realities our communities deserve to truly transform outcomes. We will organize oppression and oppressors out of power.
And so we say, We were made for these times!
-Dignity in Schools
