A crowd of more than 100 Phoenix high school students walked out of their schools on Wednesday and headed to the Arizona Capitol, where they marched while holding pithy anti-immigration enforcement signs and chanting anti-ICE slogans. The state Senate responded by locking the doors.
The students from Carl Hayden, Betty Fairfax and Central high schools told the Arizona Mirror that they organized and carried out the protest themselves to stand up for their community in the face of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign and violence from immigration officers.
“I’m here today to stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves to be the voice for the people who can’t speak for themselves,” said Julian Torres, a 17-year-old senior at Betty Fairfax High School. “I’m here to march with my peers, my friends, even some people that I don’t like, because we all have the same goal.”
That goal, Torres said, was to ensure that people are valued more than immigration documentation papers, money or walls between countries.
“People are the most valuable thing that we have,” he said.
The crowd of more than 100 students marched from their schools to the Arizona Capitol where they gathered, shouting “Chinga la migra” (Spanish for “f**k Immigration and Customs Enforcement”) outside the Arizona Senate.
Sen. Wendy Rogers, R-Flagstaff said during a Senate Judiciary and Elections Committee meeting that the Senate building had been locked down because of a “massive loud protest.”
Sen. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, posted a photo of the high school students outside of the Senate building with the caption “Anti-ICE demonstrators converged on the state capitol even though the only ice is in the coffee room.”
Sen. T.J. Shope also posted a video of the teenagers gathered in the Capitol courtyard, some of them holding or wearing Mexican flags.
“Always been proud of my heritage as an American of Hispanic descent but I’ll never understand waving the flag of a foreign nation on this soil while you protest our government,” he wrote in the post. “Be gone with that BS…”
Sophia Arvizu Diaz, a 16-year-old student at Central High School, told the Mirror that she and her friends were protesting on behalf of immigrants without legal status who can’t go outside because they’re scared they’ll be picked up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, as well as for other students at her school.
“A lot of them are from different countries or have family who aren’t from here, and they’re just scared to be sent back,” she said.
Some of those people, Arvizu Diaz said, “come from really scary places,” so they would rather risk being imprisoned in an immigration detention center than return to their countries of origin.
“America is supposed to be a safe place,” she said, but those detention centers are not safe places.
From outside the Senate building, the students marched around the Capitol block and returned to hold their signs and chant along 17th Avenue, directly in front of the Capitol complex, to honks and waves from some of the drivers.
Torres said he was proud that so many students showed up to the protest, and that they were respectful to one another.
“It’s really, really nice to see a lot of people out here with the same goal, with their fellow man, with their fellow woman next to them, just human life itself and it’s very nice to see our generation stepping up,” he said.
While most of the protestors were high school students, some were much younger, with parents in tow.
“I’m Native and Mexican, and I’m really mad that they’re taking my people when this is stolen land, Native land and stuff, because it’s my culture and my people,” said Liliana Ragsdale, an 11-year-old student at Solano Elementary School.
Michele Ragsdale, Liliana’s mother, was there with her daughter and another 11-year-old Solano student. Ragsdale had to pick the girls up from their school since elementary students aren’t allowed to “walk out.”
Michelle Ragsdale said she was proud to see so many young people exercising their First Amendment rights.
“For these young people to come together and march, to do a walkout at their school, means a lot, because it means that they’re paying attention,” she said. “It means that they care more than some adults that I know that aren’t standing up and aren’t even saying anything.”
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