These teachers patrol City Heights to ensure San Diego immigrants can vote safely

On Wednesday afternoon right after the school bell rings to end class for the day, English teachers Valerie Woodfill and Mary Richardson-Davidson don bright yellow vests and walk up and down Highland Avenue outside of Herbert Hoover High School. 

They and two dozen other teachers are looking for the type of vehicles they’ve come to recognize as belonging to federal immigration agents: black SUVs, with tinted windows and missing or out-of-state license plates, looping around. 

These 20-minute patrol began about a month ago, before and after school, amid escalating immigration arrests throughout California. Hoover High School serves a particularly vulnerable community in the culturally diverse City Heights neighborhood of San Diego, and the teachers want to look out for their students and their families.

On Election Day, the patrol won’t end after 20 minutes. It will last all day long.

The teachers plan to take what they’ve learned in safeguarding their students to protect the rights and safety of the entire community. 

It was, of course, a book that made English teachers Woodfill and Richardson-Davidson realize they needed to ensure the City Heights community felt safe voting at Hoover High School on Election Day. 

The school serves as a voting site for San Diego’s City Heights — a neighborhood that has been at the center of federal immigration enforcement actions. That, in turn, has left many people afraid to leave their homes, even to buy food or go to church. 

Woodfill and Richardson-Davidson worry these fears will intensify on Election Day Tuesday.

Trump administration officials have said they have no plans to target polling locations this election, and federal and state law limit the presence of law enforcement near polling locations, but amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, people are anxious and afraid. 

A Tuesday headline in The New York Times read, “As Election Nears, Reports of an Increase in ICE Arrests Across California” and the story began, “From Sacramento to San Diego, evidence of an increase in immigration enforcement has mounted across California this month.”

The teachers at Hoover High want to be proactive.

Twenty-five of them so far are collaborating with the Coronado Democratic Club to patrol the election site and to ensure that people feel safe when voting and to report sightings of any federal agents. 

“We know that we have a community here that is living in fear that will potentially not make it to the polls because of the agents patrolling this neighborhood daily,” Woodfill said. “We’re trying to get ahead of anything that might happen.”

Mobilizing support

Woodfill gifted Skye Perryman’s “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: How to Reclaim Your Power, Fight for Freedom, and Reimagine Democracy” to Richardson-Davidson for her birthday in August. 

When each got to the part describing the importance of helping marginalized people to the polls, they knew right away: ‘‘Oh, this is for us.” 

It didn’t take long for a couple dozen other teachers to commit to the Election Day effort.

The eight Coronado Democratic Club volunteers they’re working with include a retired Superior Court judge, lawyers and teachers. President Laura Wilkinson-Sinton said she hopes this group of white women from well-off communities can help protect immigrant voters. 

“We’re educated on all of the rules and regulations and the laws surrounding who can be near polling places, and we’ve decided to kind of put up a force field of women to protect our immigrant community,” she said. 

The teachers also view themselves as defenders of the immigrant community.  

“I told the kids, I said, ‘You got Nana Bear right here,’” Richardson-Davidson said. 

The principal gave the teachers permission to use their preparation periods on Election Day for patrols outside the school, and then stay at the site after school ends until the polls close at 8 p.m.

In the meantime, students and teachers have created flyers to put up around City Heights with voting rights information and a hotline for the San Diego County Registrar of Voters in case people see federal agents. The flyers note that state law bars federal immigration enforcement within 200 feet of polling sites on Election Day and state that is all of Highland Avenue.  

At the advice of an employee at the San Diego County Registrar of Voters Office, neither the teachers nor members of the Coronado Democratic Club will hold any signs that day.

They don’t want to attract attention to themselves. They just want to help.

They are still looking for more volunteers, especially anyone who can help after 4 p.m. over the last four hours of voting on Election Day when more people might show up to the school to vote.

Supporting students

The teachers said some students have told them their parents are too afraid to drop them off at school now. They worry about what that means for Election Day. 

“I have a student who says that her parents don’t want to leave the house,” Woodfill said.

That sentiment led these teachers to begin patrolling the drop-off and pickup at school almost a month ago. They are trained not to get involved, and instead to spread information. They share information on potential immigration vehicles and send it in a text thread, as well as to the City Heights Defense Committee, a community coalition that posts information and resources. 

Sometimes, the students come with them on the patrols. 

Some students have thanked their teachers and written that they are grateful the teachers have their backs during what is a difficult time for many of their families. 

In a speech during National Hispanic Heritage Month, one student said the teachers were stepping up and helping out. 

Richardson-Davidson called it bittersweet.

She said her greatest hope is that on Election Day, nothing unusual happens. 

“Then it’s a nothing story,” she said. “I just want it to be a nothing story.”

Even then, she said, the teachers plan to keep waking up a little early and staying a little late to patrol the neighborhood before and after school. 

“This is not just an effort to support the voters and getting to the polling place,” Richardson-Davidson said. “We’re really all about supporting our students and their families, so this effort will continue beyond Tuesday.”