Special Reports

NYC Students Protest Against Trump, Urge for 'Education Not Deportation'

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Exactly seven days after the eponymous President-elect Donald Trump's victory, hundreds of New York City high schools students marched to Trump Tower, leaving their class despite of the pouring rain.

"This is what democracy looks like!" and "Education, not deportation!" were some of the lines said by over 100 students streamed out of Manhattan's selective Beacon High School when the march began around 10 in the morning.

This was not the first time that local students walked out of their class to protest since the recent election. The said protest was organized largely over Facebook and Instagram, as reported by Chalkbeat.

The November 15 march was influence by the anger and fear of the students toward the election that left them helpless for they could not directly influence it.

According to Hebh Jamal, a Beacon senior and one of the protest's organizers, the day after the election she was in tears as lots of his friends are disabled, immigrants, and undocumented. For him, everyone was so distraught and they all want to do something about it.

After discovering the Facebook group which encourages the students to walk out of their class, Jamal helped in spreading the word at her school and said that their teachers and staff were accommodating despite that the school personnel did not support directly during their protest.

Teachers have been forced to consider with Trump who rhetoric often comes at the expense of the marginalized communities across the country and they would not be tolerated in many educational institutions.

However, the focus of the November 15 march was on the students. With only a single NYPD van accompaniment which blocked the intersection choked with rush-hour traffic so that students could safely cross, the mile-and-a-half long march to Trump soared to the Fifth Avenue tower. Both onlookers and tourists joined the chants and took video footage of the march.

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