High school students in San Francisco on Monday opened up to California’s lieutenant governor about their fears for the future.
Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom paid a visit to Burton High School to hear from students in the wake of Donald Trump’s election to the White House.
Several students shed tears as they talked about what they think might happen if Trump follows through on his previous pledge to deport undocumented immigrants or ban Muslim immigrants.
Newsom was at the school to reassure students and to call out the president-elect. He told Burton High juniors and seniors that school districts need to counter an uptick in bullying and racism recorded since the election.
"A week after the elction, a study came out from the Southern Poverty Law Center saying there were over 700 hate crimes in the United States just in the first week, 80 of them in California," Newsom said.
Student Karen Huang fears she could be left in the U.S. alone if her mother is deported.
"Because my mom’s an immigrant, and it’s really hard for me," Huang said through tears.
Local
Newsom criticized Trump for failing to address the issue.
"What’s amazing is the extraordinary silence coming from the president-elect, who has no problem going on a Twitter storm about a play in New York but says nothing about what happened here in Danville," Newsom said.
In Danville, a high school bathroom was defaced with graffiti that labeled stalls "whites" and "colored." It was one of five recent incidents at two Contra Costa County schools.
The incident was cited in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s study, which didn’t record hate crimes, but rather hate harassments since Trump's election. A graph of those harassments shows they’ve actually declined precipitiously since the day after the election.
"The biggest hate crime incident I can remember in the Bay Area is the attacks by mobs of angry people on Donald Trump supporters in June in San Jose," said Harmeet Dhillon, vice chair of the state Republican Party.
Dhillon urged Californians to reserve judgment on Trump until they see the president-elect's new policies.
