A 17-year-old Girl Stopped ICE (For Now)
Meet the teen who spent her senior year campaigning against an ICE detention center near her school
This is Cali Overs’ senior year. But instead of hanging out with her friends or going to prom, she’s spent the year trying to stop an ICE detention center from being built near her school.
When Homeland Security bought a warehouse near her Arizona high school, Cali knew she couldn’t sit back and watch DHS turn it into a detention center.
"Everyone has a civic duty to protect the youth and the students," she said. "I believe that this facility is not going to be anywhere close to a safe space. I felt moved because I'm a student body vice president for us. With our students being 60% Hispanic, I felt compelled to be the one to step up.”
Cali began speaking out at local city council meetings. And when the mayor told her his hands were tied, Cali kept coming back month after month. She became a regular at meetings, pushed her members of Congress to support legislation banning ICE facilities near schools nationwide, and rallied her classmates to join the fight.
After school, she handed out pamphlets outside city hall, covered her laptop in sticky-note reminders of calls and emails, and faced online threats. At one point, a man commented in her neighborhood Facebook group that he hoped an immigrant would shoot her — again, this is a seventeen-year-old girl. Cali’s mom notified the police, but the comment remains posted.
But Cali was undeterred. The organizing consumed much of her senior year, leaving little time for friends and fun. She even missed her senior prom.
And Cali’s hard work paid off! In late April, AZ Attorney General Kris Mayes sued DHS over plans to move forward with the detention center without an environmental review.
A court date has not been set, and while the future of the ICE facility remains uncertain, DHS still plans to convert warehouses it purchased in other cities, which is why Cali continues to push for a nationwide ban on ICE facilities near schools.
She graduated this week but she’s continuing to fight on behalf of her community. “This is not a political issue,” she said. “This is not a Democrat or Republican thing. It is the right thing.”
If you’re inspired by Cali’s dedication, you can learn how to stand up to ICE in your own community by downloading our ICE Resistance Playbook. We can’t sit quietly while ICE terrorizes our communities and threatens our neighbors. Like Cali, we need to turn our fear and anger into action.
Great Job!