Hundreds of Students Walk Out of San Marcos, Santa Barbara High Schools to Protest ICE

On Tuesday, hundreds of students walked out of San Marcos and Santa Barbara high schools, spurred by the recent actions of ICE agents in their neighborhoods.

Fear has spread across school campuses, students reported. Some have personally witnessed the increasingly aggressive tactics used by ICE — others repeatedly hear about it. Some live with relatives who are afraid to leave their homes. 

Students’ mental health and grades have suffered as a result, they said. 

The walkouts were organized by the schools’ MEChA clubs, a national student organization “that strives for inclusivity and empowerment,” particularly for Chicano students, said senior Johanna Gomez Lopez, co-president of MEChA at San Marcos.

Gomez Lopez said that as a daughter of immigrants, the issue carries extra weight. “I’m scared of speaking in Spanish sometimes, and I don’t wear my Mexico soccer jersey out on the streets,” she told the Independent.

“I’ve had friends whose parents have been detained,” she said. “We’re so desensitized now; we’re seeing people losing their lives — losing their dignity — on our screens daily.”

But federal immigration enforcement is “now affecting all of us,” she emphasized.

“The environment on campus is tense,” co-president Carlos Vazquez added. “What we’re really doing here is showing our community that we stand with them and hopefully help shed some of that fear.” 

San Marcos students chanted, laughed, and cheered as they marched down Hollister Avenue to Magnolia Shopping Center, egged on by honks of passing drivers. Activists from Unión del Barrio, 805 UndocuFund and ICE Out of Goleta also showed up to support students.

Tongue-in-cheek signs read, “If you’re an ICE agent, your mom’s a hoe!” and “Don’t deport the Latina baddies!”  

But many were sincere. “Mis Papas Trabajan Mas Duro Que Tu Presidente” (“My Parents Work Harder than Your President”) read one. Another student had “Together We Are America” written on a football, referencing Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance on Sunday.

From Santa Barbara High School (SBHS), 200 students marched to De la Guerra Plaza, right next to City Hall. There, students were joined by city councilmembers, and stressed that communities should be places of safety, not fear.

“Families belong together,” said Liliana Torres, vice president of MEChA at SBHS. “Schools, churches, and streets should be spaces where children feel protected, not targeted. A strong community is one where families can grow without constant fear of separation.”

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Tuesday’s walkouts added to the string of rallies, marches, and vigils staged around the community in recent weeks, including the walkout of 1,300 students across five schools on January 30. Last month, these were in response to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents. Over the past year, communities have been swarmed by federal agents carrying out bag-and-grab arrests and deportations. 

Locally, it’s escalated. A masked federal agent recently pepper-sprayed a woman in the face on the Eastside. California Highway Patrol have been pulling over volunteer observers. And during the last week of 2025, ICE and DHS arrested more than 150 people over the span of four days. 

After what happened on the Eastside, school attendance was down, noted school boardmember Gabe Escobedo on Tuesday. Families were afraid, he said. But he stressed that the board believes schools should be safe places and staff are working to ensure that.

“What is going on in our country is not right,” Gomez Lopez said. “We all are America, and we’re here fighting for human rights, for the dignity of people, in solidarity with immigrants, because they are the backbone of this country.” 

Vazquez, the son of Bolivian immigrants and the school board’s student boardmember, said their club’s first walkout was last year. They were determined to keep up the momentum. Tuesday’s walkout was originally planned for next month, he noted, but in the face of recent events, they felt they “couldn’t wait another month.” 

“It’s so crucial to care about others in your community,” he said. 

But students stressed that they do not want to let anger and intimidation get the best of them, encouraging hopefulness instead. One of the five San Marcos student speakers, Josue Quezada, took to the megaphone to share a bilingual poem he wrote, titled “We Are Still Here.”

“They tell us to be quiet, to stay in line, to pretend that fear is normal, and silence is peace,” he read. 

“But we know better. We know the sound of footsteps at night. The way they knock on the door can feel like thunder in the chest. We know what it means to love a home that at any moment can be snatched away.

“They call us illegals. They call us criminals. But we are so much more than that. We have names. 

“We are students who carry our families’ stories in our backpacks. We are children of working people; of survivors; of brave individuals who crossed oceans and deserts, not for power, but for the possibility of a better future. 

“Today we walk out — not because we don’t care about school, but because we care about humanity. 

“We walk out to say no human being is illegal.”