A crowd of Santa Barbara students walked out of class Friday and marched together to City Hall and the courthouse to protest federal immigration enforcement and to call on local leaders to protect their communities. 

Students organized walkouts at Santa Barbara Junior High, La Cumbre Junior High, La Colina Junior High and Goleta Valley Junior High on the South Coast, and additional schools countywide. 

Hundreds of Santa Barbara Junior High and Santa Barbara High School students marched from the campuses on the Eastside to De la Guerra Plaza behind City Hall on Friday morning. 

Many of them held homemade signs and chanted “no justice, no peace” and called on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to stop detaining and deporting local community members.  

“We believe Santa Barbara should be a place where families stay together, where families are treated with dignity and where no one is criminalized for trying to survive,” said Santa Barbara Junior High eighth-grade student Alexis Macedo Beltran, who organized the walkout. 

“Just because we’re young, we’re not powerless,” he said.

“We call on our leaders to listen, to protect our communities, and to choose compassion over cruelty; this is what justice looks like, and this is what we’re protesting today.” 

Santa Barbara Junior High student Dayana Ramnirez also spoke.

“It seems unfair that they are breaking up families, kids, youth — it just seems so unjust,” she said in Spanish.

A Santa Barbara High School student said she will keep fighting, “fighting for our rights, fighting for a place where I don’t have to be scared to walk around on the street, scared because I am brown …. I want to be seen as people, I don’t want to be scared.”

Students decided to march along State Street to the Santa Barbara County Courthouse, where coincidentally local elected officials were holding a press conference to “urge de-escalation of immigration enforcement operations.” 

Students filled onto the courthouse lawn and cheered when they agreed with the speakers, and they cheered loudest when Macedo Beltran went to the microphone. 

“A community cannot be safe when people are forced to live in the shadows,” he said. “We believe safety comes from trust, not intimidation.”

Santa Barbara Junior High School Principal Dan Dupont was on a bicycle Friday to keep up with his passionate students, and said he was proud of them. 

The fact that students wound up at a press conference is a “happy accident,” he said. 

More than 1,300 students walked out from the district’s four junior high schools and Santa Barbara High School on Friday, Santa Barbara Unified School District spokesman Ed Zuchelli said.

Attendance of students and staff was down slightly compared with last Friday, he added.