
Protesting Oklahoma's Board of Education's proposal that parents enrolling children in public schools need to provide proof of their child's U.S. citizenship or legal immigration status, January 28, 2025. Photo: AP
Oklahoma’s Christian fascist and MAGA superintendent of public schools, Ryan Walters, faced 150 or more righteous protesters when he visited Carnegie Elementary School in a well-off neighborhood of Tulsa on Thursday, January 30. The protesters—who included parents of students at the school, retired teachers, and others—were outraged at Walters’ move, as head of the state Board of Education, to require parents enrolling their children in school to provide proof of the child’s U.S. citizenship.
One of the protesters told a local news channel, “We are all here to say our kids should not be political pawns, and all of us need to come together against fascism, and that's what this is in our state." Signs that protesters held up included “No Human Is Illegal”; “If you are not angry, you aren’t paying attention”; “Education NOT Deportation”; “White Silence, White Violence.”
As KWGS Public Radio Tulsa reported, the rule passed unanimously by the Oklahoma Board of Education, headed by Walters, to require proof of U.S. citizenship for enrolling students, was “aimed at helping President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.” Walters says the rule will not prevent children without citizenship documents from going to school. But obviously, having information about children’s immigration status in the records means that Trump’s immigration gestapo can come at any time to round up children accused of being “illegal.” Walters himself said about state cooperation with immigration raids in schools, “If a law enforcement official comes in and asks for information, we’re legally required to provide that information. If they come and ask us for certain information, we’ll happily provide that.”
The protesters at Carnegie school in Tulsa also hit at Walters’ Christian fascist moves to mandate that the Bible should be in all Oklahoma classrooms and that teachers must include the role of the Bible in teaching American history.
As the Carnegie protester quoted earlier said, this is fascism. It is very good that parents, teachers, and others in Tulsa confronted the fascists carrying out the terroristic attacks on immigrants and other people—and this needs to happen more and more, all across the country, in an even more massive and determined way.