Los Angeles Students to Use Theater to Prepare for Anti-Immigrant Crackdowns
In a Los Angeles classroom, mostly freshman actors are rehearsing a scene few teenagers should ever need to practice: what to do when immigration agents show up. Members of a student theater group called Colores Unidos are performing videotaped skits playing both ICE agents and terrified immigrants, preparing themselves and their community for a wave of enforcement many fear is coming.
Learning to Navigate Two Realities at Once
Among the students grappling most directly with the stakes of these rehearsals is Cristian, a member of Colores Unidos who has held Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status since he was old enough to qualify. Cristian was brought to the United States from Mexico by his parents when he was two and a half years old, and he still remembers the exact moment he learned he was undocumented — filling out a permission slip for an elementary school camping trip that required his parents’ insurance information. “And that’s when they told me the news that I’m undocumented, so I don’t have some of the same rights as citizens that are born here,” Cristian recalls. “Since then I’ve been really aware of it, I’ve been called stereotypes, I’ve been told certain things.”
DACA has given Cristian what many recipients describe, half-jokingly, as being “DACA-mented” — a form of temporary legal status that shields him from deportation and allows him to work, but that requires periodic renewal. That renewal process has become a fresh source of anxiety since President Trump took office. “I’m just worried that if I go and renew my DACA, it’s going to be more — how do I say this — more of a target for ICE,” Cristian says, describing a fear shared by many DACA recipients: that the very act of renewing their status, which requires submitting personal information to the federal government, could make them easier for immigration enforcement to locate rather than protect them from it.
A City Bracing for Impact
Los Angeles has particular reason to feel exposed. The city is home to the largest immigrant population of any city in the country, and Trump’s early executive orders on immigration have forced many families with foreign-born members into contingency planning that would have seemed unthinkable just months earlier. U.S. citizen children of undocumented parents now live with the knowledge that a routine traffic stop could result in a parent’s detention and their family’s separation. Immigrant parents across the city have begun preparing custody paperwork designating friends, relatives, or even teachers to take temporary custody of their children in the event of what the administration euphemistically terms “expedited removals” — summary deportations carried out with minimal due process.
The anxiety has not stayed confined to the United States. A previously unseen wave of asylum seekers has begun crossing from the U.S. into Canada, driven by fear that the Trump administration will deny their pending petitions and deport them back to the countries they originally fled, rather than risk waiting out the process inside the U.S.
Theater as Rehearsal for Reality
Against that backdrop, Colores Unidos’ choice of medium is deliberate. Role-play and theater give students a structured, lower-stakes way to practice responses to a scenario many of them may face for real — how to remain calm, what rights to assert, and how to avoid the kind of panicked mistake that could make an already dangerous encounter worse. The students continue rehearsing during lunch periods and after school, preparing for their next performance in front of the broader school community.
This kind of grassroots, peer-led preparation would prove to be an early version of a response that spread widely across Los Angeles schools in the years that followed. School districts throughout the region, including Santa Ana Unified and eventually Los Angeles Unified itself, would go on to develop formal “Know Your Rights” trainings and distribute cards instructing students on how to respond to immigration officers — an institutionalization, at the district level, of exactly the kind of preparation Colores Unidos’ students were improvising in a classroom in early 2017, well before it became standard practice.
For related coverage of immigration enforcement and family separation, see our piece on the Karnes detention center hunger strike, or browse our full Policy & Rights archive.