A crowd of students from Gahr High School marched down to Cerritos College in their protest against ICE deportations in the afternoon on Feb. 7.
The protest was started through an Instagram page from a student who is in the theater program at the high school according to Sofia Carlos, who is also a student from Gahr High School.
“This Instagram page was about protesting and there were a lot of schools just hosting walkouts and then I think people decided that it was time that gahr did it too,” Carlos said.
She also said that the protest just started as a rally on the field until staff unlocked the gates and told the students that they could walk out but they would not be able to come back onto campus.
“Some people were like, we didn’t know that we couldn’t go back on campus but I think most people either went home or are here right now,” she said.
Carlos also shared how teachers felt about their students going out to protest, “My first period teacher wasn’t very fond of it which is why a lot of people didn’t walk out until after first period, because some of the teachers were kind of being a little bit off about it.”
“I understand teachers not wanting us to miss school, but I mean, it’s kind of for a good cause,” Carlos stated.
Cerritos College wasn’t the only place these students went to protest according to Carlos as they made other stops as well.
“We did it outside of our school for a while and we’ve been walking for about, three hours. We went to City Hall and that was the main thing,” she said.
Carlos continued, “We went to the mall and security got a little bit mad and now we’re here.”
Another student from gahr, Jossy, discussed why these students left the campus and walked around the city, “At first was supposed to be at our school, but we realized that what difference are we going to make if it’s just going to be at the school…we needed to spread it out to the people.”
They were able to spread it out to a few people who were at Cerritos College to witness the protest which were Stephanie Meza Fanelli, an EOPS counselor at Cerritos College, and Eddie, who is a student at Cerritos College.
Both of them were unaware of the protest beforehand but they came out to support the students and expressed how proud they were to see these students protest.
“It’s very enlightening seeing that the younger generations are joining us and being educated amongst what’s happening in our political regime and understand that we as Americans and especially immigrants as well, we carry a lot of power in this country,” Eddie said.
Meza Fanelli added, “I’m proud of them…for me, it’s just more or less an opportunity to be more informed as to how I can support these students who are from our community and could potentially be our students here. And what can we do as a college to be more, um, collaborative with the high schools and protecting their rights too as students.”
Jossy finished with, “This shows that we are trying to make a change and it’s not a couple of kids just goofing around. We’re trying to make a change to show that immigrants are allowed to be here just like everyone else.”
