Sticker shock: lawsuit claims Nevada student expelled for pro-ICE emblems
Complaint says student expelled for putting up pro-ICE stickers in a hallway
A Nevada student was expelled for putting pro-ICE stickers around his high school, according to a federal lawsuit filed by his father last week. If true, the school engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.
I say “if true” because, so far, all we really have to work from is the complaint itself and a vague statement from the school that, because of student privacy law, is necessarily non-specific. I have no specific reason to doubt the complaint, but it is, by its nature, one side of the story. With that caveat, let’s look at the story it tells.
On Jan. 21, 2026, hundreds of students walked out of Clark County School District schools to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They gathered on school grounds, chanted, and carried signs. At least a couple of the signs, as highlighted in the lawsuit, compared ICE agents to Nazis and included swastikas. The district’s response to the walkout, in part: “CCSD encourages students to be active participants in democracy by taking the time to research important issues and express their opinions civilly and peacefully.”
N.C. was a student at East Career & Technical Academy, a school in the district. The day after the protest, N.C. arrived to school early and placed (in the words of the complaint) “approximately six” stickers about the size of a Post-it note along the walls of a hallway. The complaint doesn’t show the stickers, but describes them as AI-generated images of the school’s logo (its mascot) and the words “‘ICE Immigration Enforcement’, ‘Border Security Academy Deportation Force,’ and ‘Titans ICE’.”
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The stickers were removed by the time the first bell rang, the complaint says, and the next day, N.C. got pulled into a closed-door meeting with Assistant Principal Thomas Smith. According to the complaint, Smith said that the acceptability of the student’s actions depended on “what lens you look at it through” and asked the student how he would feel if someone put up stickers that said “let’s go get whitey.”
Smith then suspended N.C. for a “racially motivated incident.”
Three days later, the student and his father appealed the suspension to Smith. According to the complaint, Smith told the pair that N.C.’s actions were “considered racism because the majority of the school is Hispanic,” and compared the anti-ICE stickers to a burning cross because it could be perceived as intimidating.
No, seriously. Seriously, that’s what the complaint says happened. The vice principal compared a Post-it sized sticker affixed to a hallway wall to a man-sized yard display engulfed in flames.
So you can see why I’m so annoyed that I don’t see a picture of this sticker. I was a kid in the 1980s. We know a thing or two about stickers. I’ve seen it all — holograms, lasers, puffy, Lisa Frank, vinyl — heck, I’ve ordered custom scratch-and-sniff FIRE stickers that smell like a campfire. You know what I’ve never seen? A sticker that preceded a lynching. It’s just not part of the whole deal. It’d be quite a dramatic shift in the Klan’s whole motif, with stickers, and Trapper Keepers, and maybe the pointy hood turned into a side ponytail with a scrunchie.
The family appealed again, this time to Principal Natasha Lerutte. On Jan. 30, they expelled N.C. for his supposedly “racist” incident of putting stickers on the wall. When the student tried to compare his actions to the walk-out, the response was that the school didn’t want to talk about other situations. (Like, say, the one where they “encouraged students to be active participants in democracy.”)
Assuming the allegations in the complaint are true, the law is pretty straightforward. Tinker v. Des Moines — decided in 1969, the year students wore black armbands to protest the Vietnam War — established that students don’t “shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate.” Schools can restrict student speech only when it would cause “material and substantial disruption” to school operations or collide with the rights of others. These stickers were removed before school started without disturbing a single class period. The disruption threshold wasn’t approached, let alone crossed.
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In theory, the school could punish a student for putting up unauthorized posters (or putting them up outside of authorized areas, assuming the stickers went up in places that weren’t, like, bulletin boards). But that wasn’t the reason for the expulsion. If the complaint’s allegations hold true, the school engaged in viewpoint discrimination, letting other students engage in conduct that would merit discipline in ordinary cases (i.e., walking out) while bringing the hammer of Thor down on N.C. specifically because of his views. That’s unconstitutional.
Another reason to think the student’s story holds water is that this is not CCSD’s first encounter with viewpoint discrimination. The complaint notes a 2015 case in which the district settled a lawsuit over its refusal to approve a pro-life club at a sister school. More pointedly, a nearly identical case at ECTA itself was settled in 2024, after the Students for Life club sued over the school’s refusal to let them distribute flyers — CCSD agreed to pay $36,000 in legal fees and revise its handbook. The settlement came with a memo reminding district administrators that “students are not exempt from the First Amendment.” Apparently the reminder didn’t reach everyone.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada. We’ll keep you posted as the case develops. And before someone accuses FIRE of being pro-ICE, I’ll gently remind you that we sued them yesterday.
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You either believe in the first amendment or you don't. It's not applied on a sliding scale. When he wins , part of the settlement should require all administrators at all levels to attend a remedial class on the 1st amendment, followed by submitting a personal essay on why it's important, something tied to their lived experience.
I don't like ICE, but I hate even more this kind of viewpoint discrimination. As usual, the school administrators (assuming the complaint proves to be correct) are behaving as lily-livered, weak-kneed pushovers for whiners who are aghast at the horror of hearing different views than their own.