The Brief

As students at Maywood Academy High School in Los Angeles County prepared their backpacks to return to school, some packed additional items they never had before — government-issued documents verifying their legal immigration status and cards listing their legal rights.

These small details are signs of growing anxiety after deportations started hitting close to home.

Johanna, a student at the school, was arrested in June, alongside her mother and younger sister, while attending a scheduled immigration court appearance for their legal asylum case.

News of her arrest sent shock waves through the school, already on edge because of the omnipresent presence of immigration agents in and around their neighborhoods.

“It didn’t feel real, being completely honest, because we’re kids. We should be planning when to hang out but instead we need to identify which cars could be immigration and which cars can’t be; we need to be cautious; we need to know our rights,” said Chelsea Duran, a friend of Johanna’s.

Another student, Isaac, said as an immigrant, he always understood he needed to be careful, “but not to that point where I can’t speak Spanish, or I have to be scared just for the way I look or where I come from.”

The degree of fear he felt increased drastically this year in a way he and his friends had never experienced or expected.

“I’m not even safe in school. I’m not safe anywhere,” said Isaac. He and other students quoted in this story declined to share their last names out of security concerns.

Isaac shared that sentiment while sitting in a classroom filled with posters meant to empower students from immigrant backgrounds like his, in a school where, on the first day this year, the staff held a rally holding signs that read “Education not deportation.” But even that environment was no match for the summer he and his classmates endured.

Duran found out from her homeroom teacher that Johanna, 17, had been detained, and remembers seeing her teacher struggling to catch her breath, looking “like she had seen a ghost.” One classmate told Isaac he felt so afraid that he planned to run straight home as soon as school was out.

In a recent U.S. history class, teacher Yitzel Jimenez asked students to choose five events in their lifetime that they believe should be included in the history of the country. Her students mentioned Johanna and the fear in their communities.

‘She could have had a life here’

Johanna playing chess in school.

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Johanna’s peers said she is kindhearted, passionate, sociable, hard-working, and one of the best students at the school.

In the 18 months since fleeing violence in Guatemala, Johanna joined several clubs (hiking, chess, crochet), was one of the fastest competitive swimmers on the school team, and was on her way to being valedictorian. She had made up her mind to pursue a career in the medical field.

“She was really trying her best here,” said Francisco, a classmate.

Students Deserve MAHS, a school club the students interviewed for this story are part of, helped organize a walkout earlier this year to protest the immigration raids. After Johanna was detained, Duran shared her story at an LAUSD board meeting, asking the board to support their efforts. She said she never heard back from them. Students also helped Hector, Johanna’s father, publish a fundraising page that raised over $21,000 and made flyers that were shared widely on social media.

A flyer made by Students Deserve MAHS was shared widely on social media in the days following their classmate’s detention.

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But a month later, on July 5, Johanna, her mother and sister were deported.

“They jailed them to drive them to despair,” Hector said in Spanish.

Hector said that Johanna cries often when she thinks about her life in Los Angeles County. Her teachers called recently to inform her she ended last school year with top grades, despite being arrested before completing her final exams. The call left her in tears.

“She’s really worried because she’s now behind this school year,” he said. The school year in Guatemala begins in January, and they decided to wait for the new year to enroll.

“I tell her to be patient and that she’s going to start soon,” said Hector, who described Johanna as always having loved school.

Her older sister, Dulce, who also attended Maywood Academy, remains in the U.S. with her father. But, like Johanna, she did not return to the same school.

Hector and Dulce moved to the Bay Area, where he has work opportunities and immigration enforcement is not as heightened as in Los Angeles, he said.

But they have yet to grow accustomed to the loss of half of their family. Hector said Dulce has struggled to make friends at her new school.

Back at their former school, there are constant reminders that the sisters are missing. Duran no longer sees Johanna in the hallways on their way to class and can’t playfully race her as they did all of last year during swim practice, where they became friends after Johanna welcomed her into the team. Eduardo said seeing an event flier with a photo of Johanna recently was painful.

“It still hurts to know that she could have had a life here,” he said.

Widespread stress and anxiety

In the days that followed Johanna’s arrest, the neighborhood around the school was thrust into the center of intense immigration enforcement activity. Maywood Academy sits in the middle of a small cluster of predominantly working-class Latino cities with large immigrant populations in southeast Los Angeles County.

The week after Johanna’s arrest, Kristi Noem, the secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, brought a film crew to an immigration raid at the home of a pregnant U.S. citizen, and videos surfaced of violent arrests by immigration agents at the local Home Depot and car washes. A few days later, a group of people in Johanna’s former neighborhood, including one of Duran’s friends, were tear-gassed as they watched ICE agents arrest a teenage U.S. citizen at the same time as another group of agents arrested an aspiring Marine and U.S. citizen just a few minutes away. That same day, armored military vehicles drove along main street intersections.

Eduardo was in Mexico over the summer, but he kept getting messages from friends back home, saying: “ICE is literally one block away from me,” or “ICE is at the Food 4 Less,” or “ICE is here.”

Students Deserve MAHS helped fundraise to cover Johanna’s legal fees. On a recent school day, they shared information about students’ legal rights and printed posters with messages such as “Education not deportation.”

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Francisco moved from Mexico two years ago, joining his mother and sister, who had migrated to the United States two decades prior.

“I felt free,” he said about when he initially arrived. “I always thought that this state, this country, was the land of freedom.”

But things are different now. “I feel scared and threatened every day of my life,” he said.

Isaac recalled when immigration agents were one block away from his house recently. “I remember being scared for my mom, mostly because she still has to go to work,” he said. “It was so scary to think, ‘What if they get her? What am I gonna do?’ I have nobody but her to take care of me and my sisters.”

Eduardo noted the fear goes both ways: “It must be so hard sending your kid to school. I’m not a parent, so I don’t know how it feels, but I can’t imagine how scared you’ll be for your kid the way I fear for my mom getting deported.”

As the summer came to an end, Duran feared that, because the school calendar is public knowledge, immigration agents would plan a raid for the first day of school.

Returning is always nerve-wracking, she said, but her concerns were new this year. “Would we be safe? Are we able to go home to our families? Go to school safely without getting detained, getting questioned?”

She remains afraid, “it feels like you have to keep your guard up no matter what.”

‘A hurricane that blows through’

Research shows that immigration raids increase stress and anxiety among children with undocumented parents, and also among neighbors and community members, even when those people are U.S. citizens.

A recent report published by mental health professionals at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine characterizes the mental health impact of immigration raids as a public health emergency.

One of the authors, Dr. Lisa Fortuna, said the deportation of a classmate, like Johanna, heightens the anxiety students are already experiencing simply because they live in neighborhoods where people have been detained because they look Latino or speak Spanish.

“If you have a peer who’s taken away suddenly, even if you’re not their close friend or have been interacting with them, it’s still something within your school environment where students are at risk,” said Fortuna, who chairs the department of psychiatry and neurosciences at UC Riverside. “And there are lots of other students who may have their own risks or their own experiences on top of that. So it just becomes this cumulative stressor.”

Fortuna said teachers, too, need mental health support because they are also experiencing stress from witnessing detentions in their community and working with families who have experienced the detention or deportation of family members.

“It’s like a crisis or like a disaster situation, because you really have something that is in a concentrated way affecting people in your community,” said Fortuna. “It’s similar to if you have a hurricane that blows through.”

Jimenez said, “This year it does feel more exhausting to come back.”

Some of Jimenez’s students are now practicing a play for Día de los Muertos, a cultural event that honors the dead. Their performance will inform peers of their rights in case they are stopped or questioned by immigration officials.

“Although it feels like there’s so much going on, I do feel like you find the most hope in the classroom,” Jimenez said. “Despite all the despair that’s happening, you still find a lot of hope and resilience in the kids.”