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Students leave high schools, march for immigrant rights
03/27/2006
By JAMIE STENGLE / Associated Press

Thousands of students walked out of high schools in Dallas and Houston on Monday, marching to parks and federal buildings to rally for immigrant rights as Congress worked on several immigration proposals.
As thousands of other protesters rallied around the country, some Texas students carried Mexican flags while others carried posters calling for Congress to recognize immigrant rights.

"I was surprised that I was able to pull the numbers that I have," said Duncanville High School student Gustavo Jimenez, 16, who said he was inspired to organize a protest after seeing encouragement for protests on MySpace, a social networking Web site.

Jimenez, who said he started alerting students to the Dallas-area protest via e-mail, text messages and flyers, told The Associated Press that they wanted "to let the government know that we're here too and we have a voice."

"I was really proud that a lot of kids came out to represent," said Jimenez, a U.S. citizen whose parents came from Mexico. "We're here to live a better life."

The Senate Judiciary Committee rejected a proposal Monday that would have criminalized aid programs for immigrants. It approved an amendment that would protect charitable groups, but also approved more than doubling the current force of 11,300 Border Patrol agents over the next six years.

"This is a national issue that certainly caught the attention of our students," said Dallas school district spokesman Donny Claxton. "We will be working with them in ways to help them forward their concerns to their appropriate federal legislator in the coming days."

He said the district hasn't decided about any disciplinary action for the 2,500 to 3,500 students from their district who participated.

About 50 students from the Dallas-area Duncanville school district are believed to have participated, said Tammy Kuykendall, a spokeswoman for the district. She said those students would not face disciplinary action.

Students from two Houston-area high schools walked out of class in protest Monday.

Up to 200 marched down the streets of north Houston, some ending up outside a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office. While the protest was peaceful, the students would face disciplinary action, said Ben Wilson, a spokesman for the Aldine Independent School District.

At a high school in the suburban Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, between 200 and 300 students walked out of class but were convinced by their principal to go into the school auditorium to talk about the issue, said district spokeswoman Kelli Durham.

The students, who were back in class within an hour, will not face disciplinary action, she said.

Similar events were held over the weekend in other U.S. cities, including one in Los Angeles that drew more than 500,000 people.

On Saturday, a rally at City Hall in Dallas drew about 1,500 protesters demanding that Congress abandon the House-passed measures that would make being an undocumented immigrant a felony and erect a 700-mile fence along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border.