A few dozen Dunlap High School students took advantage of their half-day of school Friday and gathered outside to protest Immigrations and Customs Enforcement actions taking place across the country.
Students held signs, blew whistles and chanted phrases such as «ICE out» and «protect the immigrants» as lines of after-school traffic drove by.
The crowd was comprised of roughly 50 Dunlap High School students, a handful of adults and only one counter protester, a Dunlap High student who held a flag that said «DEPORT ILLEGALS. SUPPORT ICE.»
Dunlap senior Sammit Chidambaram organized the protest after watching ICE enforcement actions unfold in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago. Specifically, he said the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good at the hands of ICE agents were deeply troubling.
Chidambaram said ICE has been targeting Democratic states and worries that ICE could target Peoria, which he called a «pocket of blue» in central Illinois.
«Peoria has a big immigrant population, we have a huge Hispanic, we have a huge Asian and Indian population and it would be so easy for (ICE) to unfairly target people by race, which is what they are going to do,» Chidambaram said.
Protest organizers like Chidambaram have been receiving death threats this week from anonymous accounts online, he said, after the protest was announced.