Three teachers drove through a quiet neighborhood in southern San Diego, the sun not yet fully up over the horizon. They drank coffee, talked about their jobs. The start of the school day was still an hour or two away.
Suddenly, mid-conversation, they spotted something: what appeared to be an undercover Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, driving right past them.
To an untrained eye, the unmarked SUV didn’t look out of place among the dozens of other cars lining the residential street. But the educators saw what many might miss: the completely tinted windows of the unmarked Dodge Durango (a popular choice for law enforcement), the small strip of lights near the front of the car, the steel prisoner partition faintly visible inside (dividing the front seat from the back). Sure enough, the SUV’s driver picked up a handheld radio.
Watching this, high school teacher Marysol Duran clicked her own walkie talkie to life.
“We have identified a potential,” she reported to others in her unit, following closely behind. “He is on 39th and Gamma. We will keep close watch.”
Duran, and other members of her organization, are not just teachers. They’re also members of the Association of Raza Educators, a group of activists that regularly patrols southern California streets to keep an eye out for ICE. When they spot undercover agents, who may be in the area conducting surveillance or actively planning to arrest or detain someone, they alert the surrounding community: via social media, group chats – and sometimes a giant megaphone.
The fall morning they spotted the Dodge Durango, the teachers were patrolling a several-mile radius near half a dozen local schools. That choice of location was intentional. Only two months earlier, at least four parents were arrested or detained by immigration officials near schools in San Diego county alone. Outside one Chula Vista elementary school, an undocumented mother, who had allegedly overstayed her visa, was arrested during morning drop-offs as her children watched from the car.
ICE’s San Diego field office did not respond to several requests for comment regarding the suspected undercover vehicle or any other San Diego arrests near school sites.
In the US, children have the right to a free public education from kindergarten to 12th grade, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status. Although immigration officers were previously limited in their ability to make arrests in or near “sensitive locations”, like schools and churches, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded those Obama and Biden-era guidelines earlier this year. School districts like San Diego unified have passed resolutions that require ICE agents to obtain a warrant before entering school property, but that has not stopped a spate of arrests from happening just off school grounds.
So when the three teachers noticed the potential ICE agent in October, they turned their car around and followed. The Dodge parked and the teachers did, too. Juan Orozco, a high school counselor, watched from the driver’s seat. Duran sat next to him, and Aremi Lopez, an elementary school teacher, clutched a megaphone in the backseat.
After a few minutes, the Dodge sped away without warning. The teachers drove after it.
“Buenos días, compañeros,” Duran reported in a series of live social media updates. “Estamos en la comunidad de Shelltown. Estamos aquí reportando, parte de la Asociación de Raza Educadores y Unión del Barrio, y tenemos movimiento: un Dodge Durango. Gris.”
She immediately translated: “We are here reporting from Shelltown, San Diego. We have identified a Dodge Durango, grey, that has been surveilling our community.”
Fear among students and parents across southern California is at an all-time high, particularly after the supreme court ruled earlier this fall that federal agents can stop and detain residents in Los Angeles simply for speaking Spanish, appearing Latino or working certain types of jobs. Now, there have been instances where students don’t come to school because they, or their parents, are scared to leave the house, Orozco said.
“We live in a state of fear, [whether you’re a] citizen or not a citizen: plumber, professional, mother, grandma, everyone,” he said. “And we shouldn’t live like that.”
But teachers, and a handful of their students, are also quietly and consistently mobilizing in big and small ways: by hosting morning patrols near local schools, organizing know-your-rights seminars, and keeping each other informed about the presence of ICE.
“We said: ‘Hell no, we have to resist,’” Orozco said. “We have to stand for dignity and protect this safe place for us: schools.”
‘They’re coming after all of us’
In the small library of a nearby San Diego high school, 14-year-old Azda* sat across from her sister, 19-year-old Guadalupe*. Behind them, many of the books on the shelves and posters on the wall had activist themes; an illustration of Che Guevara peeked out from the top shelf. In the hallway outside the library, a hand-painted banner read “education not deportation”.
The school is located only a few miles from where the teachers spotted the suspected undercover ICE vehicle just a week before.
And while Azda just started her freshman year of high school there, and Guadalupe her second year of college nearby, the sisters often have more on their minds than other teenagers might.
Because of where they were born, Azda is a citizen, but Guadalupe is undocumented. They’ve always worried that one day ICE may pick up their mother, who is also undocumented.
“I do fear for her,” Guadalupe said of her mother. “But not only just when she’s dropping off her kids at school, it’s every second of the day.”
Growing up, their family had a specific action plan in case of emergency, like other parents in California might prepare for earthquakes or wildfires. But instead, Azda and Guadalupe’s mother prepared them for ICE. If she was deported, their mother told them, they would need to immediately seek help from their aunt, or close friends who lived nearby. Then, to avoid breaking up the family, all of them would need to “flee together” back to Mexico.
Azda and Guadalupe have tried to explain this looming specter of ICE and deportation to their younger siblings, in ways they might be able to understand. When it comes to their little brother, who is four years old, they’ve chosen their words carefully.
“We have to simplify these big concepts to him,” Guadalupe said. “We just say, like, ‘Okay, la migra, they do bad things. They take families – se llevan a las mamás [they take mothers].’”
The language of ICE protests has even worked its way into the four-year-old’s budding vocabulary. He’ll sometimes walk around the house, they said, chanting: “¡La migra, la policía, la misma porquería!” [Or: “Immigration, police, the same garbage.”]
This year, as ICE agents have circled San Diego neighborhoods, businesses and school zones, Azda and Guadalupe have felt perpetually on edge. Everywhere they go, whether to school, or the grocery store, or to hang out with friends, they’ve learned to scan for signs of undercover ICE vehicles: Are those overly tinted windows? Does that SUV have a different kind of license plate?
That sense of unease follows Azda when she goes home, too. As she scrolls through Instagram, reels of dancing and cooking videos bleed into shaky footage of people from around the country being dragged away by ICE. Often, their spouses or children stand off to the side, screaming and crying. But recently, after seeing one of those videos, Azda got angry. She put down her phone and wrote a poem, titled La Migra.
“Todo lo que te digan es una mentira. ¿No saben que esta es nuestra tierra también?” [Or: “Everything they tell you is a lie. Don’t they know this is our land too?”]
Azda’s high school, which is uniquely involved in anti-ICE activism and patrolling, has encouraged her burgeoning sense of advocacy. A majority of the school’s students, if not all, are undocumented themselves or come from mixed-status families, according to staff members there. Azda has attended meetings about how to patrol around her school for ICE, and has walked around her own neighborhood with her aunt to look for “suspicious cars or suspicious people”.
She also recognizes that because she’s a US citizen, unlike her sister and mother, she has an added layer of security when it comes to protesting or being outspoken about immigration issues.
“I don’t feel like I have to do this, I feel like I want to be the one to do it,” Azda said. “Because if I’m not, then who is?”
Guadalupe attends monthly Association of Raza Educators meetings, but thinks her school in particular – San Diego City College – could do more than just hosting a few know-your-rights sessions.
“It’s something that we have to keep actively engaging with. It can’t just be a one-time workshop,” she said. “You can’t just do things by yourself. If something happens to you, you need to have this group of people backing you up.”
As a kid, Guadalupe sometimes felt a gulf between her and her siblings when it came to their differing legal statuses. Now, though, it feels as if they’re all under threat.
“La migra [immigration] and the state are attacking anyone that’s brown. They’re attacking anyone, even US citizens,” she said. “So I don’t feel that division no more. It’s like they’re coming after all of us.”
‘The right to an education’
The three educators on the early-morning ICE patrol agreed: students across different age groups, from high schoolers to younger elementary school students, have had similar responses to the immigration crackdown. Fear, they said, is an equalizing force.
“They’re all stressed, scared,” Orozco remarked from the driver’s seat, before they spotted the undercover ICE vehicle. “They don’t know what this means.”
San Diego has seen far more immigration arrests in 2025 than in years past; three times as many people were arrested by ICE in just the first half of this year compared to all of 2024, NBC reported. More than 50% of the 2025 arrests involved people with no criminal convictions.
But the immigrant community in San Diego has felt some version of this fear for a long time, Orozco added. Unión del Barrio, the southern California-based political organization that founded the Association of Raza Educators, first started conducting community patrols to scan for law enforcement more than three decades ago. And the recent supreme court ruling merely formalized the racial profiling that’s been happening behind the scenes for years, he said.
When he was 12 years old, in the early 1980s, Orozco remembers waiting at a bus stop in downtown San Diego. An unmarked white van – with the telltale metal prisoner partition inside – pulled up unexpectedly in front of him. What he believed to be immigration agents got out and threw Orozco, who is an American citizen, in the back.
“And I started kicking and screaming, kicking and screaming,” he said. “Then they pulled off to the side and the two officers said: ‘Say the Pledge of Allegiance.’ I started saying it and they let me go.”
Orozco walked shakily back to the bus. Bystanders were shocked. “It looked like a kidnapping,” he said.
On a policy level, there is some hope on the horizon: in late October, the San Diego city council voted to move forward with an ordinance that, once passed, would require federal law enforcement to have a warrant to access any non-public area within city facilities, including places like recreation centers and libraries. The city’s ordinance does not apply to schools, which are already covered under the school district’s previous resolution.
But the “terrifying” reality, said San Diego councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera, who authored the new ordinance, is that areas like streets and sidewalks just outside of schools are considered public spaces, and “the ability to legislate federal action” in those locations is “just incredibly, incredibly limited”.
“If I could pass a policy that made every school, every street, off limits, I would do everything I could to do that,” he said.
As for the outcome of the teacher ICE patrol in October, the three educators eventually lost track of the undercover vehicle they were following. At an intersection, Duran and Orozco looked left to right, and examined the parked cars in driveways for signs of recent movement. But the Dodge was gone.
“There’s the relief that although we did lose [the vehicle], we did at least change their plans,” Duran said. “And they might not have had the luck to execute whatever they were expecting to.”
As the teachers ended their morning patrol and headed back to their original meeting point, the neighborhood began to fill with families. Parents walked hand-in-hand with their children to an elementary school nearby.
“You see the beauty of our community,” Duran said, watching the scene unfold from the passenger seat. “Just doing what any other human being would do in the United States: taking their children to school because they have the right to a free education.”
With the patrol over, Duran, Orozco and the other educators and volunteers quickly packed up their gear: their mounted car cameras, their walkie talkies, their megaphones.
It was 7am, and they needed to make their way to their real jobs – the school day was starting soon.
*Editor’s note: Azda and Guadalupe’s real names have been changed in this story to protect their identities.
