This article is republished with permission by User Magazine, an independent media outlet on Substack that shares commentary and reporting on the online world. Subscribe to User Magazine here.
Recently, some Roblox players have been conducting virtual Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. There have been Roblox players dressed as ICE agents that barged into other player’s houses. They have “arrested” a user hiding in his kitchen and chased down another player while conducting “Border Patrol” surveillance. Roblox ICE agents hunted down a young player in his Roblox home, banging his door down.
Tensions reached a boiling point, and last week — as thousands took to the streets to protest ICE in the offline world — Roblox players protested within the game, battling cops, breaking down barricades, waving Mexican flags, and facing off across a line of players dressed in police SWAT gear.
Despite being primarily a children’s game, Roblox has evolved into a sort of emergent civic theatre for kids online. The game is now where thousands of children go to process major world news events through highly intricate role play. These simulations are how many young people experience news events, representing a shift towards more participatory forms of media.
Simon Gutierrez, a 17-year-old high school student who organized yesterday’s Roblox protest against ICE, said that he wanted to attend the IRL “No Kings” protests this past weekend, but his older sister said no. So he staged a protest on Roblox to allow other young people to make their voices heard. “A lot of young people really want to protest and put their words and beliefs out there but are unable to, so this is the only thing we can turn to,” Gutierrez said.
The ICE protests in Roblox have primarily taken place in Brookhaven, a massively multiplayer role‑playing experience on Roblox. The experience’s name is based on the real city of Brookhaven, GA, where offline ICE raids and protests are also taking place. Last Thursday, police arrested six people involved in anti-ICE protests in the IRL Brookhaven.
Roblox’s Brookhaven is the most‑visited Roblox experience ever with over 65–70 billion visits, and it has essentially become the internet’s default metaverse where events in the “real” world often play out in-game.
Since the initial ICE protest in Brookhaven last week, half a dozen more protests have been planned. Roblox users are posting dates and times on TikTok along with their usernames or Discord server links, in order to coordinate and solicit attendance for the rallies. The response from TikTok users has been enthusiastic.
This is not the first time Roblox has gotten political. In 2020, teenage Roblox users replicated the wave of protests against racial injustice and police brutality following George Floyd’s murder. Roblox users have also protested Israel’s assault on Gaza, staging pro-Palestine virtual protests in the fall of 2023. One pro-Palestine protest was visited more than 275,000 times. The protests against ICE have not yet reached that scale.
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