Intercultural Club, Black and Brown Girls, and Common Ground partnered in a letter writing campaign on Sept. 15-16 outside the lunch room. The Dreamer’s Act gives undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. as children a renewable two-year period in which they are protected from deportation but can apply for a work permit and pursue an education.

Trump plans to end the program.

Junior Isabel Saavedra-Weiss was infuriated when she heard the news and immediately looked for ways she could help.

“When Trump announced that they were going to end DACA, I started looking around and doing research with one of my friends about ways that we could help…and one of the things we found was a Huffington Post article about letter writing,” Saavedra-Weiss said.

She contacted the leaders of student clubs and affinity groups IC, BBG, and Common Ground to let them know that they could help as well, and what started as Saavedra-Weiss’s personal activism quickly grew into a school-wide initiative.

“Next thing I know they had printed out about sixty of the sample letters and set up a table in front of the lunch room for people to sign the letters and send them to the White House,” Saavedra-Weiss said.

“We had people sign the letters individually because we really liked the effect it has if you send a whole bulk of 80 letters to one place that all say the same thing but have all different signatures on them. We’re going to put it all in one envelope with a title page over it that says, Dear President Trump, these are all signatures of people who disagree with you.”

Even if the letters themselves don’t inspire policy change, Saavedra-Weiss hopes that they make a statement: “We need resilience to make it clear that this isn’t going to be cool with us. DACA is a really important program to many, many people, and the U.S. gains a lot of really important people through DACA, which is a thing that a lot of people don’t understand. I hope that we’re at least showing that we support those students and that we want those students to stay because we realize that we need them, even if the White House doesn’t.”

Saavedra-Weis added: “It [the letter writing] was a really simple thing on our end; we just made a couple signs and printed out a bunch of paper and then sat and talked to people who seemed interested, and there was an overwhelming amount of support streaming through. This makes me motivated to keep taking action in ways that I think will be beneficial to our community, because we do a lot of talking here and we need to start doing more action.”

This story was reprinted from The Rubicon print edition September 26 2017.