Trouble pulling multiple repos using GH actions, deploy key only works for composer file pulling from one repo how to automate several repos?

So I am trying to build a deploy action. I want to listen for a merge to a branch on any of several repos and when the merge happens I want to:

1. Checkout a specific branch
2. set the php version
3. run composer update (get the most recent hashes from all repos)
4. run composer install (clone all the repos locally)
5. deploy to Acquia

I have everything working until the action tries to check out the repos, I am getting a error:

Failed to execute git clone --mirror -- 'git@github.com:organization/repo1.git' '/home/runner/.cache/composer/vcs/git-github.com-xxxxx.git/'

Cloning into bare repository '/home/runner/.cache/composer/vcs/git-github.com-xxxxx.git'...
Warning: Permanently added the ECDSA host key for IP address 'XXX.XX.XXX.X' to the list of known hosts.
git@github.com: Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

In the yaml I have:

run: |
  composer update north*
  composer install -q --no-ansi --no-interaction --no-scripts --no-progress --prefer-dist

I have tried using php-composer-v6 but I get the same error. There are more than one repo so the deploy key does not seem to be the right solution.

here is an example of the repositories entries in the composer.json:

 "repositories": {
        "0": {
            "type": "vcs",
            "url": "git@github.com:organization/repo1.git",
            "no-api": true
        },
        "1": {
            "type": "vcs",
            "url": "git@github.com:organization/repo2.git",
            "no-api": true
        },

There are many repos - nine.