Opinion: Before You Judge the Winters Students, Try Understanding Them

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The Vanguard’s coverage of the Winters student protest revealed a familiar fault line in this country. It is easy, from behind a keyboard, to scold teenagers. There is nothing new about that dynamic — in the 1960s, similar generational divides surfaced as older adults condemned student protesters over the Vietnam War.

In social media criticism — often from out-of-town, if not out-of-state, older adults — much of the outrage has been directed squarely at the students themselves. They have been described as manipulated, indoctrinated, naïve, pawns. 

Lost in that reaction is a basic but critical point: this protest was about ICE and immigration raids — about enforcement actions that have disrupted families in their community — not about gender identity or any of the unrelated cultural issues that critics later injected into the debate.

The problem is that many of the people criticizing these young people do not appear to understand the community they are criticizing.

As always we need to start with a fundamental misunderstanding of the law. 

Under California law, students’ participation in civic protests during the school day is supported by California Education Code § 48205, which allows school districts to excuse absences for reasons deemed valid by administrators, and many districts recognize civic demonstrations under that authority. In addition, § 48907 protects students’ First Amendment rights on campus, affirming their right to free expression so long as it does not cause substantial disruption or fall within narrowly defined exceptions.

Therefore, anyone arguing that the students simply “should have been in school” misses a key legal and civic point: California law recognizes both the authority of districts to excuse civic participation and the constitutional free expression rights of students. 

Whether one agrees with their cause or not, the students’ participation was lawful. Any suggestion that these students were engaged in misconduct simply by walking out collapses under the most basic legal scrutiny.

But legality is not the real source of controversy. The deeper issue is empathy — or the absence of it.

The protest in Winters centered on ICE and federal immigration enforcement and their consequences, not on gender identity, medical procedures or the cultural flashpoints imported from national cable debates.

Yet the conversation was quickly reframed — I would go further and suggest that the message was hijacked.

Beth Bourne exercised her First Amendment right to counter-protest and had every legal right to be there, a point no serious observer should dispute.

But she inserted herself into a protest focused on immigration enforcement while carrying signage supporting Trump and Vance, pivoted to discussions of “breast amputations” unrelated to the issue at hand, and proceeded to yell, record and escalate the rhetoric in front of teenagers.

Legality answers only one question: Can she do it? It does not answer another: Should she do it then and in that way?

To understand why that question resonates so sharply in Winters, consider who these students are.

According to publicly available 2024–25 enrollment data, Winters High School’s student body is approximately 65 percent Hispanic or Latino, about 31 percent White and about 2 percent African American, with other groups representing very small percentages. 

Winters is a farming community in Yolo County where many families work in agriculture, many households include mixed immigration statuses, and many have direct experience with federal enforcement policies through raids, detentions, deportations or the persistent anxiety that accompanies them.

For students in such a community, immigration policy is not abstract ideology or a talking point but a lived reality measured in whether a parent comes home at night, a relative is detained, family income disappears into the detention system or a younger sibling suddenly needs care after an older family member has been removed.

Many of these students — including those who are U.S. citizens — are intimately and directly impacted by what is happening in their community, and the suggestion that they should simply focus on school ignores the reality that the policies of the Trump administration have made that far more difficult.

These students have not been trained or recruited; they are responding to circumstances they are living through in real time.

It is telling that many online commenters asked why these students were protesting “at all,” as if high school students could have no authentic reason to care about immigration enforcement — an assumption that says far more about the commenter than the students and reflects the misguided belief that teenagers exist in a sealed civic bubble, insulated from public policy.

These are the students whose families have borne the brunt of the Trump administration’s immigration policies — policies that have led to raids, detentions, deportations and the constant uncertainty that follows — and it is hardly surprising that young people growing up amid that disruption would feel compelled to speak out about it.

Students do not live in abstraction but in families and communities, absorbing conversations around kitchen tables, witnessing fear when rumors of ICE activity circulate and seeing classmates disappear for weeks or months — and in a school that is roughly 65 percent Latino in a farming town, it is implausible to pretend these policies are distant.

Critics may argue that teenagers lack sophistication or are especially susceptible to influence, but even if that is true in some contexts, it does not follow that their grievances are manufactured, as adolescents are fully capable of recognizing when federal policy destabilizes their households and do not need professional organizers to notice the absence of a parent.

What makes the backlash especially troubling is how readily the discussion shifted away from immigration policy itself. Instead of engaging the substance of ICE enforcement — its costs, its goals, its impact on families — the focus moved to the behavior of the students and the spectacle of the counter-protest.

When Beth Bourne invoked “breast amputations” at a protest about ICE, she hijacked the students’ message, changed the subject and raised the emotional temperature around an issue that had nothing to do with the students’ stated purpose.

Adults frequently say they want young people to be engaged citizens, lament apathy and criticize youth who seem disconnected from civic life, yet when students organize around an issue that directly affects their community, the response often turns dismissive or hostile.

There is a kind of selective respectability at work: youth activism is often celebrated in hindsight when it aligns with mainstream consensus or can be comfortably historicized, but in real time — particularly on politically charged issues like immigration — the instinct is to question the legitimacy of the young.

Some of the loudest critics support the very enforcement policies now under protest, and that is their right in a democracy that accommodates sharp disagreement. But they cannot reasonably claim ignorance of the consequences, as those policies do not operate in a vacuum and reverberate through towns like Winters.

Moreover, by carrying a Trump/Vance sign into that space and then inflaming the moment further with unrelated shouting about “breast amputations,” Bourne was not merely expressing a view but deliberately rubbing those policies in the faces of students who are living with their effects.

If you support robust immigration enforcement, you should be prepared to confront the reality that it disrupts families — sometimes permanently — and, if you believe that tradeoff is justified, make that case openly, but do not pretend the disruption does not exist or belittle teenagers responding to what they have witnessed inside their own homes.

There is a broader civic lesson here: while the First Amendment protects speech on all sides — including both student protesters and counter-protesters — constitutional protection does not confer moral wisdom or insulate conduct from scrutiny.

When adults enter a charged environment involving minors and choose an antagonistic posture, they should expect that choice to be evaluated. 

Much of the social media outrage appears driven less by genuine concern for children than by reflexive culture-war instincts, as the students’ protest was folded into a broader national struggle over identity, ideology and partisanship, causing the specific realities of Winters to disappear from view.

But context matters.

A school that is 65 percent Latino in a farming community is not an interchangeable stage for national political theater but a particular environment with distinct vulnerabilities, where students carry the weight of policies debated far away and know firsthand which classmates are afraid, which families are strained and which rumors of enforcement activity spread panic.

Critics who “do not walk in their shoes” may believe they are defending order or decorum. 

Yet their indignation rings hollow when it ignores the structural forces that prompted the protest in the first place.

If we want people to move beyond reflex and outrage, it starts with empathy grounded in facts: Winters High School is approximately 65 percent Latino, many students come from farming families, many have directly experienced the effects of federal immigration enforcement, they are permitted under California law to participate in civic protests and a counter-protester likewise retains constitutional protections — but understanding who these students are and what they are living through must come first.

From there, we can have an argument about policy, tactics and tone.

We cannot have an honest argument if we refuse to acknowledge who these students are and what shaped their decision to act, and, before condemning them, critics should stop and confront a harder question: What would it look like to grow up in their position and live with the consequences of the very policies you defend?

Beth Bourne is entitled to advocate for her core concerns, but inserting herself into a volatile protest over immigration enforcement — with an issue unrelated to those concerns — only inflames tensions rather than advancing meaningful dialogue.

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