Defiance at Maximum Security High

Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Roy Romer Tuesday declared all high schools in the district on "lockdown," which a newspaper (the NewStandard) pointed out is "a term originating in and usually limited to the prison industry."

Nevertheless, over 8,500 students walked out in Los Angeles County alone - thousands more joined walk outs in neighboring Riverside, Orange and San Diego Counties. Thousands of other students in the Bay area, as well as Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Texas have also left school in protest. When the lockdown proved more effective in LA high schools, grade school students started walking out in protest.

These were among the growing protests against the Republican immigration bills in Congress. All demonstrations, including the largest ever seen in Los Angeles, have been peaceful. But students report being roughed up in their own high schools by police in riot gear.

Meanwhile, Homeland Security is putting the finishing touches on its immigrant detention centers on U.S. soil, where entire families may be sent, for the first time since foreign nationals, immigrants and native-born Americans of Japanese and Italian extraction were imprisoned in North America during World War II.

This is the future according to Bush and his corporate dictatorship.

Protest demonstrations are planned in other U.S. cities in the coming days and weeks.