Utah Valley University students gathered in the hallway outside the school’s career fair on Wednesday to protest the Department of Homeland Security, which had representatives staffing a booth alongside more than 70 other organizations.
The student group sponsoring the event, the Civil Disobedience Club, was formed last fall, shortly after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated on campus on Sept. 10.
Standing slightly apart from the protest, UVU’s student body president, Kyle Cullimore, told the Deseret News, “It’s been a crazy, crazy year.”
Cullimore was helping administrators with crowd control when Kirk was shot. “Nobody was expecting that to happen. It was probably the most high intensity place I’ve ever been,” he said.
But Cullimore said political groups on campus “still feel comfortable to be tabling and doing things in the hallways here, just like how other people feel comfortable protesting.” He added, “I just hope that I’ve been able to do a good job of representing all of our students here, because at the end of the day, we have students that believe all different types of things.”
Aside from random outbursts of profanity directed at ICE, student protesters sat quietly in their taped-off sections of the hallway while their classmates shuffled into the school’s ballroom for the career fair.
Students said they were looking for community in protest
Civil Disobedience Club Co-President Harper McGee told the Deseret News she felt scared to come back to campus after Kirk was shot and killed, “because we were there protesting when it happened.”
“It felt like the world was going crazy, and there was nothing anyone could do ... and we wanted community,” she said.
Regarding Wednesday’s protest, McGee’s fellow Co-President Jack McNiven added, “We hoped there would be a chance that Customs and Border Protection wouldn’t come if there was enough friction with it.”
McGee said across the activism accounts that reposted it, their flyer for the protest reached 50,000 people. It was notably reposted by Indivisible and BURRN.
And on the other end of the political aisle, UVU’s College Republicans communications director, Sage Lloyd, told the Deseret News, “We’re glad DHS is on our campus, and we welcome them with open arms. College Republicans would love to see them on campus again at all of UVU’s job recruitment events.”
Charlie Kirk’s assassination turned up the heat on political discourse
Alexander Draper, secretary of the Civil Disobedience Club, told the Deseret News that Kirk’s assassination at UVU “really just exploded everything.”
“Immediately we had people pointing fingers, throwing blame against the radical left, against transgender people,” he said. Draper said his LGBT friends have felt threatened on campus since the shooting. And some conservative students have said the same.
Kirk was shot while answering a UVU student’s question about transgender-led mass shootings, and the 22-year-old man charged with killing Kirk, Tyler Robinson, is alleged to have been living with a partner who was transitioning from male to female.
For students who were already politically minded before Kirk was killed on their campus, the assassination and its fallout “exacerbated the situation that we already had,” Draper said.
But for some other students, September’s assassination is far from their minds. UVU student Ella Smart told the Deseret News, “I’m here to protest against ICE. I think their actions are absolutely abysmal and they lack humanity.”
Sariah Holmes, a member of the school’s Students for a Democratic Society and Civil Disobedience clubs, added that she’s worked with her classmates to make “ICE whistle kits” and voting rights flyers.
She said her clubs have at times worked in conjunction with Utah’s chapter of American Federation of Teachers, a teachers union.
Other students say they’re choosing to not let politics interfere
Josue Salazar, a UVU student studying psychology, told the Deseret News the protesters “are fine to do it, but I just don’t know how much of a difference it makes.”
Salazar was on the outskirts of Kirk’s event when the speaker was shot and killed. “It was scary. It’s honestly really sad that it happened here,” he said.
Salazar added that most UVU students have “moved on” from the assassination. “They know it’s not going to happen here again. We’re not worried about that,” he said.
