Nervous laughter and then fear overcame Mansfield High School seniors Soriyah Jennane and Lacey Hughlett when their principal and assistant principal quickly approached them and demanded their cameras this past February.
They were there to photograph a historic student walkout for the yearbook, just as they did for many major events at their Texas high school. This time, though, the assignment ended with their principal deleting their photos and forbidding them from covering the walkout.
Their experience was not an isolated one.
As thousands of students across the country walked out of school in January and February to protest the killing of two Minneapolis residents by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, many student journalists were prevented from covering one of the biggest stories of the year.
The walkouts were the single largest subject of censorship reported to the Student Press Law Center’s Legal Hotline this past year, representing about a fourth of more than 200 incidents of high school censorship.
From Texas to Michigan, students have faced administrative censorship to keep these walkouts out of the public record, all while one Minnesota student publication gained a media spotlight for its work at the center of the national story.
Photos deleted in Texas
Forty minutes outside Dallas, student journalists at Mansfield High School have had a generally positive relationship with their administrators.
So when Jennane and Hughlett were confronted in the street by their principals for taking photos of the student walkout, they said they weren’t expecting it.
“We didn’t really know what to do. It was our principal, and she’s yelling at us, so we did give her our cameras. But we started taking our memory cards out because they were our personal memory cards,” Hughlett said. “We wanted to keep the pictures, and she’s like, ‘Nah, not any of that crap, don’t do any of that, give me the film right now.’”
The two students were stunned.
“I kind of laughed a little bit when she was starting, because I was like, ‘Is she joking? I don’t understand. Like, what’s going on? Why’s she coming up, screaming at us?’” Jennane said.
With seemingly no choice, both of them handed over their cameras.
In the aftermath of this incident, Hughlett said she talked with her principal, and recounted the principal saying things like “I’m on your side,” “I understand what you guys are trying to do” and “I used to be in newspaper.”
However, when the school returned Jennane and Hughlett’s cameras and SD cards the next week, their photos were gone without explanation. They weren’t ready for that to be the end of the story.
After contacting the Student Press Law Center’s Legal Hotline, Jennane and Hughlett were put in touch with a pro bono Texas lawyer who wrote a letter to the school June 2 requesting an apology for the deleted photos.
Mansfield High School has not yet responded to the attorney’s letter or to a request for comment on this story.
Guidance from the Texas Education Agency, issued as student walkouts spread across the country, warned that schools could face state investigations and sanctions if they encouraged or facilitated “inappropriate political activism deliberately disrupting the learning environment.”
Free speech advocates noted that such aggressive threats put school administrators in the difficult position of balancing students’ First Amendment rights with the state’s expectations to maintain order, but SPLC Staff Attorney Jonathan Gaston-Falk said that doesn’t justify silencing reporting or seizing journalists’ materials.
“The significant threats from state officials created an environment in which administrators were fearful of student expression. It’s not surprising then that we see administrators overreact to comply and, in the process, significantly curtail the rights of students, including student journalists,” he said. “There is no safety or educational purpose in preventing journalists from reporting on what has already transpired, or in seizing their intellectual property, all in the name of a vague and overreaching state mandate. Beyond the troubling censorship, school officials, as government actors, are generally required to respect legal protections against the search and seizure of journalists’ work product and newsgathering materials except in limited circumstances.”
‘Tinkering’ with student expression in Michigan
Roughly 1,100 miles north, students of Grandville High School also walked out of class in protest of ICE earlier this year.
This time, student media found a way through administrative censorship to report on the student walkout — though indirectly.
When their principal sent word through their journalism adviser that The Grandville Bark was not allowed to cover the protest, the staff changed their focus, senior writer Jayden DeHaan said. Instead of the protest itself, they wrote about student speech rights and the landmark case Tinker v. Des Moines, which addressed student protests during the Vietnam War.
The story included quotes from their principal — the same one who barred their coverage — about limitations he put on the anti-ICE student walkout, including its out-of-the-way location.
“It wasn’t because I was trying to stifle the student voice,” Grandville Principal Adam Lancto said in The Bark’s piece Tinkering with Student Expression. “It’s because of the students who are sitting back in class. I can’t negate their rights as students to be distracted in the learning environment because of what a group of students’ opinions and expressions are.”
Lancto did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
DeHaan said the piece went through rounds of edits from Lancto before publication.
Despite the irony that an explanation of student speech rights was subject to heavy administrative prior review and restraint, DeHaan was proud of the work the staff did to eventually get it published.
“It’s definitely a journey,” he said. “I think as hard and dragged on as it’s been, it’s been a lot of fun to write this.”
The Tinker ruling was never meant to silence students, but to give them a framework for being heard. In a time where social and political polarization is increasingly visible, the lessons of 1969 remain as relevant as ever. By providing a structured space for expression, schools like Grandville do more than just follow a handbook; they demonstrate that while students do not ‘shed their constitutional rights at the school gate,’ those rights exist within a delicate balance.
— Excerpt from Tinkering with Student Expression
Minnesota shows the power of student voices
At the center of many ICE walkouts and news stories around the nation was the Jan. 7 killing of Renee Nicole Good, which took place three miles from Roosevelt High School.
Just months earlier, Roosevelt junior Lila Dominguez restarted the student newspaper that had lain dormant for over a decade, The Roosevelt Standard. On that same Jan. 7, she published an opinion piece that went viral — appearing in articles from The Guardian and Minnesota Public Radio.
Her piece, “ICE Needs to Get Out Of Minneapolis,” was a deeply personal recollection of what happened that day.
“Later in the afternoon today my high school Roosevelt was paraded by ICE vehicles during dismissal. Our community and staff stepped up to protect one another. I was in the basement of Roosevelt while all of this was happening, and the role that I watched the wrestling coaches jump into to protect our students is a role I wish no teacher or coach would ever have to be in,” wrote Dominguez in her op-ed.
The article was simple, timely and haunting.
“Its hard to process these things, especially when they are happening at our front doors. The second I got home from Roosevelt today at 5:00 the first thing I did was hug my dad tight,” she wrote.
The Standard would go on to publish six more articles about the surge of ICE officers in Minneapolis and its effects, including a student walkout.
“It was really important to talk to people at school and figure out what really had happened and just communicate the truths, because it was a very confusing time for a lot of people,” Dominguez told MPR.
SPLC’s Gaston-Falk said Dominguez’s work is exactly the type of stories only students can tell.
“Students are often the only ones in the room when history happens at their school. When administrators block that coverage, they’re not just censoring an article — they’re erasing or sanitizing the only firsthand account that will ever exist of what their students lived through,” he said. “Minnesota’s legislature recognized this when they passed the New Voices law protecting the rights of student journalists so they could tell these stories within reasonable limits.”
In 2024, Minnesota became the 18th state to pass New Voices legislation, which significantly raises the bar administrators must meet to censor student media. Press freedom advocates in Texas, Michigan and elsewhere continue to push for similar laws in their states.
Lessons of censorship
Another student journalist, who wanted to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said the threat of disciplinary action led them to pull their story about a walkout at their school. But ultimately, the experience of being censored galvanized them to stand up for their rights and to do more reporting.
“We’ve actually gotten to learn a lot about the writing process and how this all works behind the scenes, with all the legal aspects…,” they said. “So I think that’s the exciting part — that we’ve gotten to gain so much more knowledge from the experience. And I think for me, that’s just what’s kept me going, because it’s like a challenge and it’s exciting. It’s like a nervous exciting.”
For Jennane and Hughlett in Texas, they decided to push back and to share their story so other students wouldn’t have to experience what they did.
“Our end goal was just to have something be made clear that principals and districts don’t have the right to stop students from taking photos, regardless of what the protest is,” she said.
Hughlett was able to recover at least one of the deleted photos she captured in Mansfield, though due to administrative pressure, it was never published. Until now.
If you’re a student journalist or educator looking for legal support, contact the Student Press Law Center’s free, confidential Legal Hotline.