Protests seemingly swept cities across the country Friday and Saturday as part of a “National Shutdown” opposing immigration enforcement.

The premise: “No Work. No School. No Shopping. Stop Funding ICE.” Nurses, teachers and others were urged to walk off the job in a national strike.

The deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti — both shot by federal agents in Minnesota, and both with ties to Colorado — were tragic. The Trump administration would be wise to rethink some aspects of its immigration enforcement strategies and its public messaging. There’s a reason Americans seem less comfortable with the policy than they were before.

But the protests raise their own questions. Should nurses abandon patients to make a political statement? Should teachers leave students behind in the name of “solidarity?”

While numerous teachers called out Friday, most Denver metro districts stayed open. But Aurora Public Schools and Adams 14 closed, while some schools in other districts were closed or had a delayed start.

Denver Public Schools didn’t close, but it canceled all preschool classes and center-based programs for students with disabilities, according to Chalkbeat.

Kids with disabilities paid the price so adults could protest.

Participating educators frame school closures as serving a higher cause. That’s unacceptable. Politics doesn’t justify leaving the people you serve in the lurch — no matter how passionately you feel.

Besides, the protests continued into Saturday. Teachers could have waited one day to march.

The education side of these protests matters — not because schools closed but because of why many educators felt compelled to walk out.

For a year, Colorado’s largest and most influential district has driven the false narrative that schools are unprotected from ICE raids — a narrative that pushed teachers into the streets.

“What’s happening across the nation is deplorable,” DPS Superintendent Alex Marrero said in a video to district employees last Thursday. “We, as a district, have led the charge across the nation when it comes to protecting our community, protecting our students, and sometimes even leading when it comes to making sure that nothing happens to the safe haven that is our classroom.”

He’s referring to the lawsuit he took to federal court a year ago this month. The district sued to block a Trump immigration enforcement policy, arguing that ICE raids at the Cedar Run apartment complex — near district schools — proved schools were no longer “protected areas.”

Marrero alarmed families by declaring that, under two 2025 Trump administration memos, “schools are no longer protected areas,” and federal agents operated with “no meaningful oversight… near, around, or on school premises.”

“Not only were people fearful following the raids,” Marrero claimed, “but they also did not have any guarantee that the next raid would not be at the school.”

But none of it was true. Pressed in court, the district couldn’t tell U.S. District Judge Daniel Domenico whether the raid violated the prior Biden-era policy blocking raids on school grounds.

It didn’t. The new policy simply shifted approvals from D.C. by empowering local ICE directors to exercise “discretion and common sense,” just as they’d done prior to Biden.

Not a single ICE enforcement action has happened on K-12 school campuses — in Denver or anywhere else.

Domenico denied DPS its nationwide injunction. He wasn’t about to let one district rewrite federal immigration policy, especially based on unsubstantiated claims.

Now, faced with teachers skipping school en masse, Marrero started singing a different tune.

“I want to acknowledge that many of you want to show your advocacy tomorrow, and I commend you for that,” Marrero said in last week’s video. “However, I want to make sure that everyone understands that as long as students are in here because of the actions that we’ve taken, this remains the safest place for our scholars.”

Marrero deserves some credit for resisting his natural impulse to close the district and for calling schools “the safest place for our students.” But he can’t escape responsibility for the fear his district helped spark.

DPS stoked fears of unsafe schools a year ago. Rather than exposing harm, its lawsuit manufactured it.

When Marrero tried to tamp down those fears last week — fears he helped inflame — it was too late.

In the week before the protests, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association posted imagery on social media declaring, “KEEP ICE OUT OF SCHOOLS.” On Friday, the union professed “a moral and professional responsibility to keep students safe.”

Their Facebook page features protest photos, including staff outside Smith Elementary — fists raised, holding signs reading “Keep ICE in your drinks NOT in our schools.”

Fears of in-school deportations have kept some students home, fueled more by alarmism than reality — alarmism that began with district leadership. The partisan teachers’ union simply took the political ball and ran with it while decreeing “the Trump regime and ICE agents” have “unleashed terror and fear in our communities.”

Let’s be clear: ICE isn’t and has never been in Denver schools — or any others.

If DPS and its union want to protect students from fear and trauma at school, they should stop telling kids they’re at risk of being snatched from classrooms when ICE isn’t operating in schools.

Jimmy Sengenberger is an investigative journalist, public speaker, and longtime local talk-radio host. Reach Jimmy online at Jimmysengenberger.com or on X (formerly Twitter) @SengCenter.