SANTA CRUZ >> Southbound Highway 1 is open after being closed for five hours at the Fishhook thanks to a small group of UC Santa Cruz protesters who chained themselves to bins filled with concrete.

Six protesters began their traffic demise around 9 a.m. Tuesday, clogging traffic along Highways 1 and 17 as well as city streets for the bulk of the day.

The California Highway Patrol brought in an entanglement team using jackhammers, saws, sledgehammers and crowbars to unwind the intricate mess of wire, rebar, chains and concrete that the students had attached themselves to, according to officer Sam Courtney.

Around 2 p.m., six of the students were arrested including Lori Nixon, Ethan Pezzow, Janine Caceres and Sasha Petterson, all of Santa Cruz, Alexander Pearce of San Francisco and Sophia DiMatteo of Sherman Oaks.

The van carrying those arrested flanked by a bevy of police cars arrived at the jail about 2:30 p.m.

All will be booked on charges of creating a public nuisance, failure to obey an officer, attempting to prevent an officer from performing a duty and conspiring to execute a plan of conspiracy. The first three charges are misdemeanors and the last, a felony.

Expecting the six students to be extracted by police soon, around 20 students left Highway 1 shortly before 1 p.m. to wait at the Santa Cruz Main Jail.

Student Magally Miranda joined the protest at the jail after her morning classes, and said the demonstration was peaceful and watched by two officers on motorcycles.

Two hours after the morning crew plopped down on the highway, a couple dozen UCSC protesters began their march from the university down High Street, through downtown, up Ocean Street to the Fishhook chanting protests to tuition increases and rants against the police. They were joined by a couple dozen Santa Cruz police officers clad in riot gear.

They chanted: “No justice, no peace. (Expletive) the police.”

Police brought a van and warned the students if they didn’t disperse, they would be arrested for being on the highway.

California Highway Patrol officers were on site all morning but were unable to move the students as they were connected via pipes to six garbage cans filled with 700 pounds of cement. The students used chains and pipes to attach themselves to the concrete bins and each other.

Just after noon, officers covered the students in blankets and began the process of freeing them, which took about an hour.

“We’re interested in preserving their safety and doing everything in the safest means possible,” officer Brad Sadek said.

For a time, traffic moved slowly past the protesters using the shoulder of the road, but for hours was stopped completely, detoured around the site.

Some drivers honked and waved their arms in support of the movement while most other seem angered. One truck driver yelled: “You should drag them off the road.”

Witnesses say the group pulled up in a U-Haul a little around 9:25 a.m. on Highway 1, unloaded the garbage cans and formed a single line across the road with the metal garbage cans in between them.

In a press release sent Tuesday morning, Robert Cavooris, a UCSC Ph.D. student, said they were protesting tuition hikes, racism and police violence as part of a statewide 96-hour initiative.

“Authorities only pay attention to us when we disrupt business as usual. We are making our presence felt because the issues of tuition and violent policing are too important to ignore,” said Ben Mabie, a UCSC undergraduate.

“It’s been basically peaceful. I know when we walked up here near the highway, we were threatened with arrest by the police in riot gear, and told that we could continue marching elsewhere,” Cavooris said.

The protesters are borrowing the tactic of blocking roads used in the wake of the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City last year. They say their protest is an attempt to draw a connection between what they say is the “structural racism of tuition hikes and the criminalization and murder of black and brown youth across the country.”

“It might be inconvenient for some people, but this is nothing compared to the inconvenience of a life of debt peonage,” said Barucha Peller, a UCSC undergraduate.

There are planned protests throughout the week at Santa Cruz, Davis, and Berkeley campuses. UCSC students are planning to walk out of class and block entrances to campus on Thursday beginning at 4:30 a.m. and lasting throughout the day.

This story will be updated.