At least 14,000 mostly Hispanic students stormed out of school classes across Los Angeles in a snowballing protest against Washington's plans for a draconian crackdown on illegal immigration. Local news reports said that "tens of thousands of students" were taking part in the protest that was spreading through schools across the country's second largest city ahead of a US Senate debate on a divisive immigration reform bill.
"At least 14,000 students are protesting in the streets in Los Angeles city alone," Monica Carazo, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Unified School District told AFP.
The latest protest came after one of the biggest protests in recent US history Saturday when more than 500,000 people marched in Los Angeles against the immigration reform bill that would make it a felony criminal offence to be in the United States illegally.
Smaller protests took place in a number of cities around the country as well over the weekend and on Monday against the draft laws.
Los Angeles pupils pursued the protest Monday by walking out of class in at least 21 schools across the city and its surrounding areas, prompting education officials to lock down some campuses to keep the angry students inside.
But they leaped fences and marched through streets brandishing US and Mexican flags and chanting slogans against the immigration bill.
"If we don't leave school today, half of the school who don't have papers will have to leave soon if this law passes, and they won't come back, ever," shouted Huntington Park High School student Anita Benitez.
The Los Angeles Police Department put officers on a "city-wide tactical alert" as a precaution because of the wave of protests that included a crowd of at least 1,500 students who were demonstrating outside city hall.
The protests target a bill, already passed by the US House of Representatives, that would crack down on employers hiring illegal workers and people smuggling illegal immigrants into the country.
The bill would also require employers to verify social security numbers with the Department of Homeland Security, beef up penalties for immigrant smuggling and stiffen penalties for undocumented immigrants who reenter the United States after having been removed.
At least 11 million illegal immigrants, most of them from neighbouring Mexico, live in the United States and are responsible for keeping the human machinery of US cities humming.
