Providence, Rhode Island – As the streets of Providence filled with thousands of people joining in the nationwide protest against I.C.E on Friday, January 30th, youth activists Anya Arroyo and Audrey Dolahan, along with other RWU students were among them.
“At Roger, many of them (students) feel like they don’t have a voice or they’re not listened to. So it kind of is giving youth activists on campus a space to be able to communicate that and organize around that,” said Arroyo, a sophomore who came up with the idea for the Students4Change Instagram account, which has been used to draw attention to and organize a student protest against the furloughing of RWU staff members this past December.
Arroyo brought her friends together, including Dolahan, Ryan Trabulsi, Henry Siravo and Laney Reardon, saying she needed a “dream team” to get her idea off the ground.
“Anya was the one who came to us and was like ‘something needs to happen,’” said Dolahan.
Together the group created the account, which now has over 400 followers.
“I couldn’t do anything that I was able to do without them, honestly,” said Arroyo.
As tensions involving I.C.E rose across the country after the fatal shootings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, a National Shutdown and protest was announced to take place on Friday in every major city. Arroyo and Dolahan knew they had to get involved.
“A lot of students had come up to me and were talking to me about the I.C.E protest happening in Providence,” said Arroyo.
The Students4Change account originally announced that the students would have their own protest on campus but Arroyo soon realized they could be a part of something bigger.
“I feel like it’ll be more impactful if we could have a contingent of students figure out ways to carpool and connect with one another to get down to Providence. The whole purpose of doing a nationwide protest isn’t convenience.” said Arroyo. “ It was to spread the message and to really try to have as many people go to the mass protests in various states as possible.” In order to get themselves and other students down to Providence, they had to find a way to communicate.
“We came together as our little group and discussed times to take the RIPTA and carpooling and whatnot and that’s where the idea for the GroupMe came from,” said Dolahan.
The GroupMe gained over 30 members, but they were met with some backlash from fellow students.
“At one point there was this group of guys that all joined and I was like ‘this is so amazing look at all these white boys who want to join in the I.C.E protest’ and then of course, that wasn’t really their intention and they were there just to purely troll the group chat,” said Dolahan.
These boys went as far as sending AI-altered images of the main Students4Change members with their faces changed to look like Charlie Kirk, the right-wing conservative activist who was assassinated at Utah Valley University in September.
“We weren’t really expecting college-aged people to join the group chat for the pure thing of trolling for something that is important,” said Dolahan, “Now going forward we’re gonna have to consider that and alter that just because some people don’t know how to act.”
Even with the trolling, Dolahan and Arroyo both agreed the positive outweighed the negative.
Arroyo, who was born and raised in Providence and has been an active member of her community, has experienced this before. As a Classical High School Alum, Arroyo worked with the Providence Student Union and the non-profit, Gen Z: We Wanna Live. She also helped organize a Black Lives Matter protest in middle school.
“I had already gotten backlash from organizing outside of campus with ant-I.C.E and stuff so I already kind of knew what to expect. I got doxxed, I’ve gotten threats and stuff like that,” said Arroyo.
Although Arroyo will be more cautious moving forward, she has made it clear that it will not hold her back: “As scary as those things could be, I’m never gonna let something like that stop me from doing what I want to do.”
Arroyo and Dolahan have a plan to go about things in a way where students will not feel defensive or want to retaliate against them.
“The account was never with ill intent or towards any part of the student body or any student-run organizations. It was literally with the intent of getting students to feel more comfortable with saying how they feel and finding ways to give them the space to do so,” said Arroyo.
Through GroupMe, RWU students were able to find others going to the protest and communicate about carpooling or get information about the RIPTA. Through the account and GroupMe, there were around 50 students who attended the protest.
As the first few people to arrive in Providence on Friday, Dolahan said she was immediately handed a sign by the Party for Socialism and Liberation, who were one of the main organizers of the protest.
“It was really cool to just watch the entire streets of Providence just fill and fill and fill,” said Dolahan.
As Arroyo and Dolahan marched through the city, they saw fellow students, friends from high school and met students from neighboring towns.
“There were thousands of people there. But it was one-hundred percent great to be able to just see so many familiar faces from campus and then having people send pictures to the account and pictures to the GroupMe and be able to upload those and see what we can do as students together,” said Arroyo.
The two saw a stark difference in the types of people there compared to other protests they had been to. Dolahan saw many high schoolers and children as young as 10 years old walking alongside them.
“We were marching and then someone came by with a megaphone and was like ‘make way for the youth’ and it was a sea of high schoolers and middle schoolers…It’s very interesting to see these young people care about that and it’s kind of sad because they can’t vote and they’re watching kids their age get deported…I saw one kid and his sign was on the back of a honey nut cheerio box.”
Dolahan, who is from Charlestown, Rhode Island and works for the Johnnycake Center of Westerly non-profit, walked out of school when she was younger in a protest against gun violence. She feels like young children protesting has not been seen in a while.
“I think it’s really important that we continue to see this type of behavior,” said Dolahan.
Arroyo and Dolahan thought it was equally powerful and adorable to see the youth taking part in Friday’s protest. The way these children used slang on their signs stood out to them. Some included the phrase, “I.C.E are Chuds,” which they found funny and inspiring.
“Just seeing the lingo of the young people included in the signs was very much like a sign of the times. Just expressing their feelings about this through their own language was very interesting,” said Dolahan.
Arroyo came across many different people marching with her. One person whose parents were deported a few years ago. While they were not born in the U.S, they were brought here as a child and all they’ve ever known is America. The two also came across other college and high school students from East Greenwich, West Warwick, Narragansett, Barrington and even Westerly.
“It was so great that I saw people from the nonprofit that I know who were still in high school, literally standing up there in front of thousands of people giving speeches and directing the crowd and just taking on that leadership role and truly helping them feel empowered. It’s just such a beautiful thing,” said Arroyo.
In the future, the two are going to continue their work with Students4Change.
“We’re gonna definitely shift a lot of our focus to the furloughs specifically as that starts to ramp up. It’s important to note that non-union staff are actually actively being furloughed right now,” says Dolahan.
Arroyo expressed the importance of getting more attention from the RWU community about the furloughs and Dolahan believes it’s in the hands of students now: “We just need to spread the word as much as possible to the parents as well and the families because there’s so much emphasis on them. They’re the ones sending the schools the checks so if something is not sliding for them then it shouldn’t be happening to begin with.”
Students4Change is currently working on a petition to see what they can do and how they can get everyone involved.
