VISTA -- Hundreds of Vista High School students marched across the city Tuesday morning to Rancho Buena Vista High School as protests against proposed federal anti-illegal immigration legislation entered a second day.

With some students draped in the Mexican flag and others carrying it, students spilled into the bicycle lanes along Melrose Drive as they walked south toward the Rancho Buena Vista campus around 8:45 a.m. Tuesday morning.

"We're not criminals or anything," said Sabrina Flores, 15, a Vista High School freshman who was among the protesters. "We're here for jobs."

Sheriff's deputies in patrol cars drove alongside the protesters as they walked.

About 10 sheriff's patrol cars were along Longhorn Drive near the school parking lot as the student protesters stopped and congregated on a hillside across the street.

"We're just doing this primarily because we're trying to let people know that our race isn't going to be easily suppressed," said Luis Colmemares, a senior at Vista High School who was part of the protest.

When the Vista High School students arrived, several ran onto the Rancho Buena Vista campus to encourage more students to join the protest. But school administrators at RBV had placed that campus on lock-down shortly before 9 a.m., so students were being kept in their classrooms.

When the lock-down ended roughly half-an-hour later, a group of about 30 students left the campus to join the students from Vista High School.

As some Rancho Buena Vista students prepared to walk out, others fought to keep them in class.

"We've seen from Escondido that doing those types of protest isn't effective," said Arthur Alvarez, a student who spoke up to convince students to save their energy for a protest the students are planning for Saturday. "We want to do something that's going to be meaningful, but positive …. We want something that's not going to be degrading to our cause."

Rancho Buena Vista Principal Richard Alderson said that though administrators at the school were nervous when they heard about the approaching protestors, he was pleased that there wasn't any violence.

"I think they learned a lesson yesterday," he said of the roughly 600 students who participated in an assembly Monday morning at the school stadium to discuss the controversial immigration issue. After that rally, most students returned to class, while about 100 left the campus and marched to Vista High in protest.

During Tuesday's morning rally, a deputy said three girls had been handcuffed in the back of a patrol car, but he did not know why they had been detained.

Sheriff's deputies also handcuffed a man wearing a blue baseball cap and a plaid shirt and placed him in a patrol car. Some of the protesters said the man had been yelling profanities at them as they walked and was involved in an altercation with one of the students.

Jakob Guardado, 17, a junior at Vista High School, said the man had yelled a profanity about Mexicans at him, and that he asked the man if he wanted to take on someone half his age.

The man, who had gotten out of a white pickup truck, grabbed Guardado's hat from his head and threw it to the ground, Guardado said.