Students in Santa Maria were walking to enact change on Tuesday. A plea was made to city hall to propose local legislation that would prevent ICE agents from detaining, arresting or investigating people within a two-mile radius of schools, parks, churches and hospitals.
Students from six different schools all met up at City Hall.
“I've come to the conclusion that what I'm fighting for right now is hope for hope for our community, hope for our youth, our parents, our neighbors, you know, my siblings," the organizer of the rally, Cesar Vasquez, explained.
17-year-old Vasquez organized a walkout among three different high schools including Righetti, Santa Maria and Pioneer Valley, and junior high schools in Santa Maria to march in response to President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Some of those students even walked for hours to get out their message.
“We walked all the way from Righetti and we had just a small group of people," one student protester said. "We walked two and a half hours all the way over here. We were getting booed at, laughed at, but yet cheered on.”
The Santa Maria Joint Unfied School District was made aware of the walkouts at their schools and issued a notification to staff and parents ahead of time saying that "we do not endorse walkouts. On the contrary, we urge parents and guardians to ask their students to remain in class throughout the day," District Public Information Officer Kenny Klein said in an e-mail.
As they congregated, the number of students in the rally increased as they waited for this week’s city council meeting to begin. Before it started, the city’s office released a statement “The City remains strictly focused on local public safety responsibilities" going on to say that "Neither the City, the County nor the State of California can lawfully restrict Federal agents, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, from conducting administrative or law enforcement actions within its boundaries.”
Despite a lack of jurisdictional power to bring the 2-mile safe zone to fruition at schools, parks, hospitals and churches, Vasquez says this push stems from a proposed CA Senate Bill 48 which would “prohibit school districts, county offices of education, or charter schools from granting an ICE officer, or other federal official engaging in immigration-related investigation or enforcement, permission to access a school campus without a judicial warrant.”
"We want to make sure that all of our voices are heard and we want to tell the stories and we want to show the faces that will be affected by this," Vasquez said.
