Walkouts in San Antonio: Schools go into Lockdown as Students try to protest Immigration Bill

Yesterday, Brackenridge High School, an inner-city school in this latino-majority city, went into "lockdown," responding to student plans to walkout along with their peers in Los Angeles, California, as the U.S. Senate debates a controversial immigration bill.

"Lockdown," a term more commonly used in the Texas prisons, is a policy that local teachers explain as a shutting down of blinds, doors, and all exits in response to student shootings or an unlikely terrorist threat.

Community leaders here in San Antonio are concerned that students' civil rights are being violated - by treating the students' desire to speak out - as a terrorist threat.

Yesterday, students at Lee High School, it is rumored, walked out. Or attempted to. Teachers and students alike are cautious in talking to community leaders, fearing repercussions to their jobs or punishment of some kind.

But Fox Tech High School, in downtown San Antonio, a short distance from the San Antonio Express-News, the only English-language newspaper in the city, and also nearby La Prensa and Rumbo, the Spanish-language papers, is rumored to be expecting a "walkout" at noon today, Wednesday. And community leaders say they will be watching how the historic school treats its students' civil rights.

The students, many of them children of immigrant parents, are apparently in solidarity with hundreds of thousands of students around the country who are protesting immigration bills before Congress, scheduled for an April 7 vote in the Senate.

The U.S. Senate is considering whether millions of immigrant parents - and their children in these inner-city schools deserve a journey toward citizenship while other hard-line conservatives would make it a felony to cross the border.

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