The students knew they would be marked with an unexcused absence for walking out.
Still, about 430 did.
“We don’t care, because we’ve got to support our people,” said Milagro Middle School seventh grader Amaris Ortiz. “We’ve got to support our people who belong here.”
The hundreds of students, who left their campuses around lunchtime Wednesday, hailed from seven Santa Fe schools. Though only a few dozen — ranging from grades six through 12 — gathered at their planned endpoint in the parking lot of the Santa Fe Place mall, their message for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was unified.
“Today we walked out to show our support to the immigrants and to stop ICE and to try our best to abolish it,” said Giselle Garcia, a sixth grade student at Ortiz Middle School.
She clutched a sign reading “Ice should be in our drinks not in our cities.” Others pinned Mexican flags to their cars; some danced and chanted.
The anti-ICE walkout came amid a recent reported surge in arrests of immigrants nationwide — including in New Mexico. Last week, federal immigration agents raided a Santa Fe housing construction site and arrested several people; in August, ICE agents arrested others, including a man taking his daughter to a health clinic who was jailed for several weeks despite being a legal resident.
The headlines about the construction site arrests spurred Capital High School junior J.J. Luévano into action. “We need to do something; we need to solve this,” she said.
“We’re not aliens,” Luévano continued. “We’re Mexicans, we’re Latinos, we’re Hispanic. We are all people here.”
After talking with her mother, Earth Care community development coordinator Miriam Luévano, she created an Instagram account to spread the word about the walkout and coordinated with students at three other south-side schools.
Meanwhile, Santa Fe High School senior Genoveva Zuniga made a separate account to mobilize east-side students. When she heard about last week’s immigration arrests, Zuniga said she had to check on a close family friend who works in construction.
He did not have any encounters with federal immigration agents, Zuniga said, but she rejects the stereotypes she believes led those agents to construction sites in the first place.
“That’s their thing — that we’re stealing jobs, that immigrants are stealing jobs, that us teens, Hispanics, are stealing jobs,” Zuniga said.
Zuniga and Luévano — though they had never met before — messaged each other and started working together.
Unexcused absences, police drone
Santa Fe Public Schools sent out an email to students Tuesday as word of the walkout spread.
“Please be aware that students who leave campus during the school day without an excused absence or without following proper school procedures will be marked with an unexcused absence in accordance with district policy,” stated the email, which Zuniga posted to her Instagram page.
Some students — including 85 of the 105 who walked out of Milagro — returned to class later Wednesday, district spokesperson Joe Abeyta wrote in an email. Regardless, students’ parents or guardians would have had to call in to their school in order for their absence to be excused, he wrote.
“This protest was not initiated or promoted by Santa Fe Public Schools,” the district said in a statement. “Student safety remains our highest priority, and we believe schools are the safest place for students during the school day. We encourage families to speak with their children about the importance of remaining on campus and attending school as scheduled.”
The district also coordinated with police. Officers in the Santa Fe Police Department’s recently launched Real Time Operations Center monitored the walkouts with a drone, interim Chief Ben Valdez wrote in an email, “to ensure traffic was not being obstructed and no safety concern existed for participants and members of the community as they engaged in constitutionally protected activities.”
No criminal activity was observed or reported as a result of the walkout, Valdez wrote.
‘I’d have nobody’
Some who gathered at the mall filmed the drone. Members of Santa Fe Rapid Response — a group of volunteers that fact-checks and responds to local reports of federal immigration agents — stood in the parking lot with whistles around their necks.
Though student protests aren’t the group’s typical scene, Rapid Response member Darby Begeman said they had received a request to keep an eye out for an ICE presence around the walkout.
“I’m heart-warmed to see that students are paying attention and are concerned about what’s going on,” she said. “I’m not surprised — a lot of these individuals have family members, loved ones, friends … who may not have papers. And so I imagine there are very, very many of them who are certainly concerned about what’s happening in our country right now.”
Mateo Garcia, a seventh grade student at Milagro, said his family is composed of immigrants but he was born in the United States. President Donald Trump, he said, “has no right” to remove innocent people “out of a land that promised them good stuff.”
“I feel like it’s bad for them to take my family, because I was born here,” Garcia said. “So I’d have nobody. And immigration has no right to take innocent people who did nothing.”
Lily Alexander is a state accountability reporter for The New Mexican and Searchlight New Mexico, focusing on equity and transparency. Her position is part of the New Mexican Public Service Journalism Fund, and her stories are available to all readers without a paywall.
