Nestor Rafael Gallardo-Lopez still remembers when President Donald Trump first called Mexican immigrants “rapists” during his 2016 presidential election campaign. He was 9 years old and in third grade.
More than a decade later, it’s something the Huguenot High School senior is still grappling with. Although his family is Honduran, not Mexican, he knows that outsiders often don’t — or won’t — make that distinction, and he knows the blanket statement isn’t true.
“This is something that has been deeply affecting me,” Gallardo-Lopez said. “I’ve been growing up, and I’m watching it unfold, as the hate that has been fueled in the United States grows and grows and swells and has culminated in what is going on today.”
On Tuesday — the anniversary of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration — Huguenot students walked out of class to protest the actions of US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and the Trump administration’s broader immigration enforcement agenda.
For Gallardo-Lopez and many others at the predominantly Latino school in Southside Richmond, the march was personal — a stand against policies they said continue to cast a shadow over their lives.
“I’m afraid every day of something happening. I walk home from the bus not knowing if my mother is going to be home, and it’s terrifying,” Gallardo-Lopez said with tears in his eyes.
Gallardo-Lopez said that for the past year, he’s tried not to dwell on what could happen, instead focusing his energy on being a voice for his classmates whose families have faced raids, detentions and deportations.
The walkout took place against a backdrop of intensifying immigration enforcement in Virginia since Democrat Abigail Spanberger was sworn in as governor last Saturday. Over the weekend, Henrico County Supervisor Misty Roundtree warned about door-to-door ICE sweeps in a social media post.
According to a VPM News analysis of ICE enforcement data obtained through the Deportation Data Project’s FOIA-released dataset, ICE agents made 6,694 arrests in Virginia from Jan. 1, 2025–Oct. 15, 2025 — nearly seven times as many arrests as the same time frame in 2024. WRIC reported that out of those arrests, 70% of those booked into Central Virginia ICE facilities since Trump’s inauguration have no criminal record.
In Richmond, Mayor Danny Avula and city council have repeatedly said they stand with immigrant communities and do not have agreements with local police to cooperate with ICE. But federal agents can still operate independently, and that doesn’t prevent ICE from entering neighborhoods and making arrests.
“Ever since the new administration has come in, there has been an air of tension,” Gallardo-Lopez said. “There have been many kids who have been scared from January to now. People don’t want to talk. They don’t want to speak out. They don’t want to say anything, and it’s because they feel like they don’t matter.”
Gallardo-Lopez said that as a majority-minority high school, the students are the ones directly impacted by ICE enforcement in Richmond. (Richmond Public Schools told VPM News in Sept. 2025, that they do not collect or track data on a student’s or family’s immigration status, nor do they collect data specifically tied to students impacted by ICE arrests.)
“Many people have been abducted by ICE — kidnapped; these aren’t legal deportations,” he said. “These are families, who are coming here for a better life, being kidnapped and taken away. And the students of this school feel terrorized.”
That’s why Gallardo-Lopez, a member of the Huguenot Activism Association, decided to help organize a walkout “to create an environment where [students] can finally express their discomfort, their dissatisfaction and their anger towards what’s going on right now.”
“I don’t want to sit there and wait until something happens just to me, for me to actually care,” Gallardo-Lopez said. “There have been the people that I look up to, Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, all of these people, they did not sit there and wait for something to happen to them, for them to stand up and fight.”
Tianna Goins, senior class president and founder of the Huguenot Activism Association, said she was apprehensive when Gallardo-Lopez texted her — but knew it was time to speak up. The group spread the word using social media and text chains.
“These are our neighbors, our workers, our peers, our classmates. These are people who teach you, people that you learn from, people that you teach,” Goins said.”All this hate in the world is scary, but what students need right now is hope that we can move past us and we can fight for a better future.”
Goins said the response from students was overwhelmingly positive, adding that the walkout gave students the space to exercise their free speech rights, express themselves and show support for one another.
Gallardo-Lopez said the walkout experience reinforced something he carries with him every day: that even amid fear, uncertainty and political rhetoric, people should remain proud of who they are and where they come from.
“I want people to be able to come out every day and truly celebrate that—they need to be able to celebrate that,” he said. “They don’t have to live in fear every day. This is unjust, and we can’t let this stand.”
