In the Fight Against Ice, Kids Are on the Front Lines
From tear gas attacks to violent abductions, we are collectively witnessing the mass-scale abuse of children. Young people are fighting back.
Madeline Lane-McKinley
Last Saturday my partner, Kyle, and our 14-year-old, Zinnia, joined a union-organized rally dubbed “Labor Against ICE” in Portland. Packed with union members and local groups, as well as families, children and elders, there were thousands of people and all the markings of a “peaceful protest.”
After speeches from city councilmembers, immigration lawyers and community members, the rally then formed into a march to the ICE facility several blocks away. Within minutes, they were tear-gassed by federal agents.
That night, I was at an event in Seattle, reading the messages pouring in. When they could safely call, Zinnia told me about a six-year-old child standing next to them, asking her mother about the loud sounds. As soon as the chemical cloud reached them, the child’s sibling fell behind them. Kyle and several others helped the panicked mother. Zinnia stayed with the six-year-old. “She was so confused, and she kept rubbing her eyes,” Zinnia explained. “I had to tell her, ‘don’t touch your face, stop rubbing your eyes. I know it hurts but this will make it worse.’” Everyone around them, enveloped in the cloud, was sobbing and coughing.
Many people came with masks and face respirators, which have become staples of any protest in Portland since the George Floyd uprising of 2020. But even those most prepared were shocked by this mass assault on children and elders, along with the thousands people who showed up that day for a nonviolent demonstration.
This is a critical moment. It’s a moment of shock and outrage, but it has to be more than that.
This violence against children is nothing new. The last time Zinnia was tear-gassed was just a few months ago on the same block, where ICE relentlessly assaulted the South Waterfront with chemical warfare throughout the last year. In the fall, a neighborhood public school was forced to relocate, after green gas, pepper balls and rubber bullets were found near campus. Teachers were concerned not only about stray munitions in the school yard but also the kinds of chemicals being used. Night after night, the neighborhood was filled with green and orange smoke — the contents of which ICE still has not disclosed.
Over the last several weeks, we have seen much more of this ongoing war against children in Minneapolis. From the photograph of five-year-old Liam Ramos, abducted by ICE on his way home from preschool — by now a defining image of our times — to the sound of hundreds of unseen children, screaming “Libertad! Let us go!” in a video outside the Dilley, Texas, detention center where Ramos was sent, we are collectively witnessing the mass-scale abuse of children.
But as Mary Turfah reminds us, writing of our collective experience of witnessing the Palestinian genocide and the endless documentation of violence against children, “An image changes you or it doesn’t. That it changes you only matters insofar as you do something about it.”
Over the last few weeks, that is what we’ve witnessed: people trying to do something about this relentless horror, which feels more proximate than ever.
Many of those who have committed themselves to this struggle are young people. Last Friday there were student walkouts in high schools and college across the country. The call for the national general strike came from young people as well, beginning with student unions from the University of Minnesota. This is always the case. Young people always show up.
Over the last several years, we’ve seen historic walk outs organized by high school students around the country. In 2004, students established Free Gaza encampments in more than a hundred colleges and universities. Yet, as is always the case, the power of young people is also being drastically underestimated. In the days leading up to Friday’s day of action, there were predictable rumblings on the left, insisting that we aren’t “ready” for such an action and that we need more “serious organizing.” While these were all critiques voiced by those committed to building a stronger resistance against ICE, they fail to recognize the political agency of these students. And we should learn from that failure.
As we prepare for what lies ahead, all of us — including young people — need to take young people more seriously. Children are not figures of innocence for our political rhetoric, or “bait” for federal agents to use in hunting down parents and caretakers. We need to recognize what is already the case: that young people are not just a part of our struggles, but at the forefront of them. This demands a thorough dismantling of how we conceptualize political solidarity and the adult-centric doctrine around what is and isn’t “serious organizing.” It will require listening to kids and showing up for them. More than that, it will require learning how and when to follow them.
What happened last weekend brought back memories of Zinnia’s first time being tear gassed. Fastened to my chest in a front-pack at a solidarity march for Occupy Oakland in 2011, they were three weeks old. Kyle and I were very careful about what we could attend as new parents, choosing another such “peaceful protest” that started at a library as the public schools let out, with a crowd full of children and elders. As we began to march, I remember walking past the police who eventually launched the tear gas on us. However much we came equipped as seasoned protestors that day, we were unprepared for the horror of so many screaming children as we clutched our newborn baby and fled. Once we left, we knew what had happened: The police had used that crowd of kids to escalate. Protests grew through the night, which reached its peak when police struck Iraq veteran Scott Olson in the head with a lead-filled bean bag, causing permanent brain damage.
The next day, Olson’s photograph became another defining image of struggle, speaking to the brutality of police attacks on so many Occupy encampments that fall. After hearing about what happened at the afternoon march, a friend posted about the tear gassing of an “occu-baby” he knew. Comments ensued, demanding the baby’s parents be reported to Child Protective Services.
I have grown used to these kinds of attacks, especially after writing a book called Solidarity with Children—which has put a target on my back for fascists who spend their days obsessing and fear mongering over trans children. After this weekend, more of these threats came in after I spoke out about what happened to my kid, and I expect more threats will come in my writing this. While the volume of these attacks has grown since I became a parent at the outset of Occupy, I’m struck by the profound differences of these political moments. Occupy has long been derided as a movement without content, a mass disorganization of empty slogans, lacking a clear political message.
Today, the message couldn’t be more clearly stated. And the hundreds of thousands of people showing up everywhere, in extreme weather conditions, know what they’re fighting for. It’s what the kids were chanting everywhere this Friday: ICE OUT.
