More than 100 students at Juan Diego Catholic High School in Draper, Utah, staged a walkout in support of the immigrant community and to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security just after noon on Feb. 3.
The walkout was organized by senior Leini Tui and several of her friends, who have also set up an Instagram page: #JDCHSStudentsAgainstICE.
“What’s going on in our country is horrible, and it’s really important for our young generation to use our voices to stand up for what’s right,” Tui said. “These people are running around, terrorizing the streets, and I think it’s more important now than ever to use our voices and to stand up for what’s right, even though it’s hard.”
Tui and other student organizers coordinated with the Draper Police Department about the walkout, Draper PD confirmed.
Carrying signs that included “ICE Out,” “ICE belongs in coffee not in Utah” and “Fund education not detention,” students walked a few blocks from the school to a main thoroughfare, then did a loop of the downtown area before returning to their campus. Many motorists honked their horns loudly in support of the students.
A few parents joined the students in the walkout, including Jennifer Whitehead and Tim Boud.
“We want to support our daughter’s right to protest peacefully and to embody the principles of Christ,” said Whitehead, whose daughter Julia participated in the walkout.
“We want to help the downtrodden, help people that are victimized by this crazy ICE group, and we want people to be able to be safe and feel comfortable in their homes and not be targeted just because of their race or just because of the way that they look,” Whitehead told Intermountain Catholic, the online news outlet of the Diocese of Salt Lake City.
The walkout was not a school-sanctioned event. In a statement about it emailed to Intermountain Catholic, the school administration said, “Members of the Juan Diego Catholic High School student body have expressed strong interest in participating in today’s nationwide walkout in protest of the United States’ Immigration Policy and recent events occurring across the US.”
The statement noted that, as a Catholic institution, it is not the school’s place to comment on matters that are political in nature.
“However, we encourage our students to be Active Christians, Motivated Learners, and Responsible Citizens,” the statement said. “We recognize that this may be an experience where they are practicing those principles.”
Parents were notified on Feb. 2 that while the school respects the students’ views, official attendance policies remained in effect. Students who wished to participate without being penalized for truancy were required to be checked out by a parent through normal procedures.
Those penalties include two hours of detention and a $50 fine for each class missed.
Tui was one of those students who was not checked out, but she said having to do detention and pay a fine was worth it to her.
“I believe that this cause is something that is worth taking a couple of punishments for,” she said. “I would take a hundred hours of detention even just to walk one minute. I think this message is more important than any punishment, any detention, any fine, and I’m willing to fight for that.”
“We’re witnessing an exercise of, at most, solidarity among young people, because other people like them, who are young as well, are being placed in a very difficult situation,” Hosffman Ospino, professor of Hispanic ministry and education at Jesuit-run Boston College, told OSV News. “So to me, that’s the value. I mean, there’s a major lesson here, because normally we assume that it is adults advocating for young people.”
Ospino told OSV News the data has been elusive, on the number of Latino youth affected by the Trump administration’s heavy-handed ICE and federal operations in pursuit of migrants who lack authorization to be in the country. But, he said with the median age of Latinos in the country being around 29, “it’s not surprising one of the most impacted populations within the Latino community would be the young people.”
He underscored the impact on young people of families being separated, saying they “live in a culture of fear” of being forced to stay home from school with parents who stopped going to work to keep a low profile and not knowing whether their parents or themselves will be taken by agents.
Eighty-percent of those swept up in the immigration crackdown across the country are Christian, with the largest proportion being Catholic, according to a joint Catholic-evangelical report published by World Relief. The report found 1 in 6 Catholics (18%) are either vulnerable to deportation or live with someone who is.
According to Pew Research Center data in 2025, the Catholic population in the U.S. is 54% white (European ancestry), 36% Hispanic, 4% Asian and 2% Black. More than 4 in 10 Catholics in the U.S. are immigrants (29%) or the children of immigrants (14%).
But 8 in 10 Hispanic Catholics are either born outside the U.S. (58%) or are the children of immigrants (22%). Similarly, 92% of Asian Catholics are either immigrants (78%) or are the children of an immigrant (14%). In contrast, far fewer white Catholics — just 15% — share this immigrant experience: Only 6% were born outside the U.S., with another 9% born in the U.S. to at least one immigrant parent.
“The point here is what’s happening with migrants in the United States, and this is not just undocumented migrants or criminal migrants or anything,” Ospino said. “This is with anyone who’s being profiled. Literally, for looking not white or for looking not like (what) the government, you know, feels that people should look like.”
He said, “This is an ongoing dynamic and the bishops of the United States of America or any other Catholic organization or any other religious organization or any other advocacy organization, cannot be content with just writing one statement one day and then just moving on as if nothing else would happen.”
Ospino was referring to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ special pastoral message in November stating the body was “disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement. We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants.”
Ospino said the immigration operations have been escalating and called on the bishops to escalate their efforts as well.
“I would like to see, more often, the bishops not only writing statements, but also visiting detention centers, also celebrating Masses and celebrating vigils and going and visiting their politicians, and holding the government — all the way from the president down to any other elected official — accountable. For what is legal, for what is right, for what is good, and for what is considered an American value,” he said.
