LOS ANGELES — As class president of her high school in Los Angeles, Daniella Martinez Cerezo opened her graduation speech on Monday evening by thanking all the immigrant parents in the audience.

“We know your journey hasn’t been easy — the fear, the long hours, the sacrifices no one sees,” she said. “This diploma isn’t just ours. It’s yours, too. Every step we’ve taken was made possible by the path you walked before us.”

Then, switching from English to Spanish, Cerezo addressed two parents who weren’t there.

Her own.

“Hello, Mom; hello, Dad,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion. “I know you couldn’t be here today because you’re afraid. I don’t know how to live my life in a world without you both. I don’t say this a lot, but thank you. Thank you for giving me life.”

Her parents, like many immigrant Angelenos who do not have legal status, are avoiding public places while immigration agents roam the city.

As unrest erupted in Los Angeles over federal immigration raids, students across the city’s public schools, where nearly three-fourths of the student population is Latino, were preparing to collect their diplomas and celebrate with friends and family.

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Graduations Shrouded in Fear

But for many, what should have been joyous occasions were instead shrouded in fear.

The Los Angeles Unified School District deployed extra school officers to graduations, instructing them to be on the lookout for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and confront them if necessary. Some families, and a few graduates, stayed away from venues, preparing to watch the events through livestreams. Out-of-town relatives canceled trips to Los Angeles. And some private parties were called off, as families did not want to take the risk of gathering in large numbers.

“We walk around with heavy hearts and a sense of loss, a loss of confidence, a loss of safety,” Luis M. Lopez, the principal of Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet High School, said in an interview, adding, “It’s definitely a time of bitter celebrations.”

At Francisco Bravo’s graduation ceremony, where Cerezo spoke, a mariachi band played and students welcomed guests in eight languages. Lopez exhorted his students to “refuse to look away” from what he called a crisis in their community. The school is in the city’s Lincoln Heights neighborhood, historically a first stop for newly arrived immigrants and not far from the center of recent protests.

“As we speak,” he told his graduates, after Cerezo’s speech, “families in Los Angeles, our own neighbors, are living under the weight of fear and uncertainty, as ICE raids tear through communities, as children are being separated from their parents, as workers are vanishing from neighborhoods and people who call this country home are being treated as if they are disposable.”

One of Lopez’s students who just graduated is a young man who will enroll at UCLA in the fall. The student’s father was not there Monday night to see him receive his diploma, because the father was recently deported to El Salvador. The father was the family’s sole breadwinner, and the school quickly began raising money to help, Lopez said.

Graduation Still Brings Joy

Still, even with all the fear, there was space for joy.

In Griffith Park on a recent evening, Rita Castillo, 56, sat in the bleachers at the outdoor Greek Theater watching her niece graduate from John Marshall High School. Castillo, who works as a housekeeper, had a wide smile on her face.

“I told my niece that I am an example of somebody who did not want to sink into despair, but wanted to move up,” she said. “I have always told her, ‘If you don’t want to wash floors, you have to study.’”

Even citizens and other immigrants in the country legally were cautious amid fears that federal agents were racially profiling Latinos on the streets of Los Angeles.

Castillo said she came to the United States from Guatemala in the late 1980s. She eventually went through the process of gaining legal status. Back when she was living in the U.S. illegally, she never felt fear walking down the street, she said. But at the graduation ceremony, she clutched her passport, which she began carrying with her everywhere as ICE raids swept across the city.

“I’m a citizen now, and scared,” she said.

Superintendent Carvalho Has Walked This Path

Alberto M. Carvalho, the superintendent of the school district, came to Los Angeles from Portugal illegally in the 1980s. He said he has had countless painful conversations in recent weeks with students and parents from families of mixed immigration status — meaning the parents are often living in the U.S. illegally, and the children are citizens.

“Kids are listening to this in real time, trying to process this information, fearing for their own futures at the same time they are living extreme concern for their parents’ lives,” he said, describing the situation as “a new level of torment that honestly as a proud American by choice, not by chance, I never thought I would hear about or live through with these kids as we’re experiencing today.”

At the Marshall High graduation at Griffith Park, students and parents listened as Carvalho apologized for “not bequeathing to you an America that recognizes the potential of every single soul on its grounds.” The school’s red-brick facade and Collegiate Gothic architectural style in the Los Feliz neighborhood has made it a popular place to make movies, including “Grease” and “Pretty in Pink.” One speaker drew a line between the recent immigration raids and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

In his speech, Michael Finn, a retiring teacher, drew on the story of one of the school’s notable alumni, Lance Ito, a retired Los Angeles judge famous for presiding over the O.J. Simpson trial. Ito has spoken in the past about how his mother was unable to attend her graduation from Marshall in 1942 because she had been detained and was being held at a nearby horse-racing track. Before she was sent to an internment camp in Wyoming, Ito has said, the principal of Marshall delivered her diploma to her.

“Judge Ito said that he will never forget that when presented with a federal government that targeted its students, Marshall High did the right thing and responded by putting the needs of its students first,” Finn told graduates. “Today, Marshall High, its students and this community are again targeted by the federal government. That government threatens Marshall’s families, targets our most at-risk students and attacks the diversity that we all recognize as being Marshall’s greatest strength.”

After a tumultuous week in Los Angeles, with protests and troops filling the streets, graduation ceremonies offered a moment of empowerment for the children of immigrant families, and served as something of a call to action.

Cindy Alonso, a graduating senior at Francisco Bravo and one of the class speakers, described herself as “a proud daughter of two Mexican immigrant parents who have sacrificed absolutely everything for me.”

Addressing her classmates, she said, “Celebrating each other here, right now, in this moment, is a sign of resistance and proof that one day, this country will be what we all search for.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Tim Arango and Ana Facio-Krajcer/Gabriela Bhaskar

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