Graduation day at Maywood Academy High, where students are 98% Latino; 100% All-American

The soon-to-be Maywood Academy High School graduates processed, beaming, into an auditorium at East Los Angeles College to a recording of Pomp and Circumstance.
The crowd pledged allegiance to the flag. The name of each student joining the U.S. armed forces was read aloud to applause. Cheers erupted when the student singing the national anthem hit extra high notes for 'the rockets red glare' and 'land of the free.'
The vocalist, senior Maria Llamas, who also served as ceremony co-host, spoke in Spanish while her counterpart spoke in English. Noisemakers and shouts greeted the announcement of each graduate's name. And, those assembled cheered for more than 10 seconds after L.A. schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho described the tableau before him:
'From where I stand you are a perfect pixelation of America: the Black, the brown, the Christian, the Muslim, the native-born, and yes, the powerful immigrant.'
The Maywood Academy commencement took place in a college that has long been a center of Latino community activism — and which, like the academy, sits in a zone where immigration agents are raiding work places and public spaces, seizing people suspected of living in the U.S. without legal authorization as well as some whose immigration reviews are pending.
Valedictorian Abella Gutierrez captured the duality of so many of the graduations that have taken place all week in the nation's second-largest school district — joy tempered with an undercurrent of fear.
'A lot of our class is very optimistic and humorous, and I feel pride knowing that I'm part of that, knowing that I'm making history here,' said Abella, who will be attending UCLA and intends to major in architecture. 'So, yeah, I'm grateful. I'm happy.'
At the same time, 'I'm very upset when it comes to the situations that have been happening at the moment,' she said, referring to raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE that touched off a week of chaotic, sporadically violent protests in parts of downtown.
'It's a scar on our community, knowing that a lot of our parents and families have to worry about whether they'll be able to participate in this event, because their safety is jeopardized.'
'It's hard,' said salutatorian Mayah Flores, who plans to attend Cal State Long Beach as a liberal studies major, and then return to Maywood Academy as a teacher. 'I feel like I should feel guilty for being so happy during such a trying time for people.'
The concerns are not theoretical. Two teachers at the school confirmed to The Times that immigration agents arrested a 10th grader, her younger sister and their mother and took them to a detention facility in Texas.
The arrest did not take place at the school — there are no such reported instances to date of agents entering a campus in Los Angeles County — although there were two unsuccessful attempts in April. Instead, the mother had been seized when she was reporting in to authorities as part of the family's application for asylum, according to advocates for the family, which is from Guatemala.
'Johanna is the top student of the 10th grade at Maywood Academy High School, is an athlete on the swim team, and participates in the Hiking Club,' according to a gofundme page set up for the family. 'She is a valuable member of the school community. We are asking for her and her family to be reunited with her sister and return home to our community.'
Although the auditorium, with a capacity of about 2,000, was mostly full to urge on the 230 graduates, some relatives stayed home.
After the graduation, one senior said in an interview that his father did not attend over fears that he might be taken into custody by immigration agents.
Social studies teacher Cherie McKernan said she gets messages from students 'who are very afraid that their parents will be deported. One of the students in this line sent me a message saying that ICE was literally two stores down from where her parents work. So, it has been terrifying, very personal and horrifying to be involved. I feel like we're right in the middle of it.'
'I apologize,' Carvalho told the graduates, 'for the world you are inheriting is not a perfect world. The society we are bequeathing to you is not a perfect society. My generation and previous generations have not erased poverty, racism, oppression, depression. We have not addressed climate change. We have not dignified everyone in this land despite the words we use or the protections of our Constitution.'
Carvalho seemed to be talking about Trump as he continued: 'For those who criticize and demonize the immigrant, I want him to know what an immigrant looks like. I want him to know what an undocumented immigrant looks like.'
'They're looking at me,' he said, referring to his own arrival in the U.S. as an unauthorized teenager from Portugal.
Yet despite the ominous underpinning, people were determined to be festive, upbeat.
'I feel accomplished — hard work and dedication put into this, and now it's just on to the next level,' said Adrian Abril. 'I'm planning to go to Cal State Fullerton, and major in computer engineering.'
There also was the more traditional kind of nervousness.
'I'm not gonna lie. It's scary,' said Sadie Padilla. 'Because you lived your whole life, elementary school to high school, everything done for you. Now, it's like, you gotta figure stuff out yourself and just have to see where that takes you.'
'No matter what is going on,' said McKernan, the social studies teacher, 'they have triumphed, in this time, to graduate from high school — most of them the first graduates in their families. Their families moved here for this reason, and here they are succeeding beyond their wildest dreams and going off to college.'

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I am staring at the man accused of raping and murdering my sister, Vickie, in August 1979. She was 28. I can see him, but he can't see me. We are connected by video. He is dressed in an orange jumpsuit, sitting in a Maryland jailhouse holding room waiting for his bail hearing to begin. I am alone in a hotel room, on a business trip to New York. I am taken aback by his appearance. He was 18 in 1979. Now 62, he looks years older, agitated, eyes darting. He is Black — like me, like Vickie. I can feel my chest tightening, sweat accumulating on my forehead. Vickie's death left me with my own boogeyman. A faceless presence never far from my side. I saw real and imagined threats everywhere. My life was bifurcated into the before and the after. I lugged around survivor's baggage — sorrow, guilt and fear. And now there he is: The boogeyman has a face and a name: Andre Taylor. And, most important, genetic markers. 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I begin to worry if there will be any women left to serve. Finally, the prosecution and defense agree on four women and nine men (including one alternate). They are mostly folks of color. The hallways are cleared each morning as Taylor is wheeled into court. In person, he seems small, innocuous. I find myself wishing I knew how to hate better, but I come up empty. All I can muster is curiosity, loss and pain, wondering what had happened to him in his first 18 years of life. Kay is one of the first called to the witness stand by the prosecutor. She must formally identify Vickie in the crime scene photos. Several family members choose to leave the courtroom. I stay and watch as jurors gasp at the images or look away. Taylor sits motionless, as if the evidence has nothing to do with him. We hear emotional testimony from the man who'd found Vickie in the woods. Now a grandfather, he was 15, riding his bike near his home, when he saw her body. He had shared with the family how the image haunted him for years. When the defense begins, I start directing my bitterness less at Taylor and more at his lawyers. It's a two-person team headed by the chief public defender, a Black woman, with a white woman in the second chair. I know they are doing their jobs, but their competency turns my stomach and heart inside out. Taylor's lawyer asks the medical examiner who did the original autopsy if it is possible that Vickie committed suicide or if her blunt vaginal injuries could be from consensual sex. Absolutely not, the medical examiner says. She stands by her assessment that Vickie's death was a homicide, and that she was violently sexually assaulted. Next Taylor's lawyers take a page from the O.J. Simpson playbook and spend hours trying to dispute the collection and validity of the DNA evidence. But in the end, Taylor's own words convict him. The prosecution plays the entire two-hour video of his arrest interview. For almost 60 minutes, he denies having any contact with Vickie, and then he admits to what the prosecutors will call 'actions that amounted to rape.' 'I had sex with her to quiet her down. She was nicely dressed with nice expensive shoes. I remember those shoes. Dressed like she worked in an office or something.' He deadpans, 'She was alive when I was done with her.' In the closing argument, the prosecutor connects the dots. There was no Mikey. All the evidence points to the fact that Vickie was abducted, taken to the woods a few miles from where Taylor lived, sexually assaulted and murdered. The DNA implicates Taylor and Taylor alone. It takes the jury two hours to come back with a verdict: guilty. As they file out of the courtroom, several of them make eye contact. I silently mouth 'thank you.' :: A month later, I return to the courtroom for Taylor's sentencing. Family members are given the opportunity to make statements. We are instructed to direct our comments to the judge, not Taylor. Vickie's son speaks first. I keep my remarks short, reminding the court of the brutality of the crime, how scared Vickie must have been, and how Taylor had shown no remorse for his actions. When it is my youngest sister's turn, she first apologizes to the judge for ignoring his instructions, then turns to Taylor, and says what I wish I had had the nerve to say: ' You are a piece of trash.' She accepts the judge's reprimand and leaves the courtroom. Taylor is sentenced to life in prison. 'My actions today won't bring Vickie back,' the judge says. 'It probably won't even provide closure. But I hope it will bring you some sense of justice and peace.' Maybe one day it will. But not this day. I leave the courtroom feeling the loss of a sister — no justice, no peace. Judy Belk, former president and chief executive of the California Wellness Foundation, is a frequent contributor to The Times. She is at work on a book of personal essays about racial justice and social change.

Yahoo

a day ago

• Yahoo

Detroit teen detained by ICE has been deported to Colombia, attorney says

Detroit student Maykol Bogoya-Duarte's request to be released from immigration custody to finish high school was denied Wednesday, his attorney said. (Courtesy of MIRC) This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for Chalkbeat Detroit's free newsletter to keep up with the city's public school system and Michigan education policy. Maykol Bogoya-Duarte, the Detroit teen whose detention by federal immigration authorities last month caused an outcry and led to calls for his release, has been deported, his attorney said Friday morning. Attorney Ruby Robinson said he learned late Thursday night from Maykol's mother, in an 11:15 p.m. voicemail, that the teen was back in his home country of Colombia. Robinson said he hadn't yet spoken with Maykol, but hoped to do so later Friday. He said the teen is now with his grandmother in Colombia. Chalkbeat reached out to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to confirm the deportation, but did not get a response. His information is no longer available on ICE's detainee locator. Maykol, 18, was arrested on May 20 while he and a group of other newcomer boys attempted to join a field trip at Lake Erie Metropark, about 25 miles away from Detroit. Rockwood police stopped the teen for allegedly tailgating another car. Maykol did not have a driver's license, only a City of Detroit identification card, Robinson has previously said. His detention prompted advocacy from his teachers, fellow students, community members, and lawmakers who pleaded for Maykol to be allowed to remain in the country to finish high school. He was 3.5 credits shy of a high school diploma at Western International High School, where he was enrolled. 'I'm devastated,' said Kristen Schoettle, who taught Maykol at Western. 'The cruelty of this country really shakes me,' Schoettle said. 'This kid, my bright student, was passed along to prisons for a month, scared and facing awful conditions I'm sure, for the crime of what — fleeing his country as a minor in search of a better life? And the US government decided his time was better spent in prison than finishing out the school year.' Schoettle said she hopes to hear from Maykol today. 'I hope he's safe with his grandma. I hope he can recover from this traumatizing experience and still will dream of a better life. I'll miss him in my classroom next year and our city and our country are worse off without people like him,' she said. Schoettle shared examples of Maykol's classroom work with Chalkbeat, including what he wrote when asked earlier this year to write about freedom. 'I think the freedom in this moment is a little confusing since we can't leave safely since we don't know what can happen and it seems strange to me since we have to be more careful than usual,' he wrote in Spanish. Thousands of people signed a petition earlier last week calling on the Detroit Public School Community District and lawmakers to condemn Maykol's arrest. Dozens of people spoke in support of the teen's release for more than 2½ hours at the district's school board meeting on June 10. Afterward, the board released a statement saying it wanted Maykol to be able to stay in the country to earn his diploma. Maykol's mother attended that school board meeting, though she didn't speak. Robinson, senior managing attorney with the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, said the organization isn't representing Maykol's mother. 'But I would suspect she will try to return to Colombia at her own expense based on what she learned with Maykol's month-long, taxpayer-funded, and entirely unnecessary and harmful detention.' During the May 20 traffic stop that led to his detention, police officers could not communicate with him in Spanish and called Customs and Border Protection agents to translate. Maykol, who came to the U.S. when he was 16, had already been going through a legal process to return to Colombia after receiving a final order of deportation in 2024. He was working with immigration officials and the Colombian Consulate to obtain the documentation he needed to fly out of the country with his mother. While he made those arrangements, Maykol planned to finish high school in Detroit. Hannah Dellinger contributed to this report. Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at lhiggins@ Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.