Schools to open with unprecedented protections for children and their parents amid ICE raids

Los Angeles Times

4 days ago

Los Angeles public schools are opening Thursday for the new academic year confronting an intense and historically unique moment: They will be operating in opposition to the federal government's immigration raids and have set in motion aggressive moves to protect children and their immigrant parents.
School police and officers from several municipal forces will patrol near some 100 schools, setting up 'safe zones' in heavily Latino neighborhoods, with a special concentration at high schools where older Latino students are walking to campus. Bus routes are being changed to better serve areas with immigrant families so children can get to school with less exposure to immigration agents.
Community volunteers will join district staff and contractors to serve as scouts — alerting campuses of nearby enforcement actions so schools can be locked down as warranted and parents and others in the school community can be quickly notified via email and text.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass spoke about 'how profound this moment is in U.S. history' during a Monday news conference with local officials.
'Here you have an entire array of elected officials, appointed officials, education leaders, people committed to our children, and we are gathered here today to talk about protecting our children from the federal government,' Bass said.
L.A. schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho said recently that the nation's second-largest school system will oppose 'any entity, at any level, that seeks to interfere with the educational process of our children. We are standing on the right side of the Constitution, and years from now, I guarantee you, we will have stood on the right side of history. We know that.'
The worries among school officials and parents are not without cause.
On Monday federal agents reportedly drew their guns on a 15-year-old boy and handcuffed him outside Arleta High School. The confrontation ended with de-escalation. Family members persuaded federal agents that the boy — who is disabled — was not the person they were looking for, Carvalho said.
The situation was largely resolved by the time the school principal realized what was going on and rushed out to assist. School police also arrived and scooped up unspent bullets dropped on the ground by the agents, Carvalho said.
A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Tuesday that Arleta High was not being targeted. Instead agents were conducting 'a targeted operation' on a 'criminal illegal alien,' they described as 'a Salvadoran national and suspected MS-13 pledge with prior criminal convictions in the broader vicinity of Arleta.'
At a Tuesday White House briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, responded to a question that referenced the L.A. Times reporting about the incident.
'I'll have to look into the veracity of that report,' Leavitt said. 'I read the L.A. Times almost every single day, and they are notorious for misleading the public... This administration wants to ensure that all school children across the country, in every city, from Los Angeles to D.C., can go to school safely.'
The incident outside Arleta High is among the ongoing confrontations across the region that have provoked public protests and prompted the Trump administration in June to deploy troops to Los Angeles. Enforcement actions have included masked agents arresting people at parking lots, in parks, on sidewalks and next to bus stops.
Litigation, including a temporary restraining order, appears to have slowed down local immigration raids, but federal officials have strongly affirmed that they have not stopped.
Trump administration policy is that no location — including a school — is off limits for enforcement actions in his drive to deport at least 1 million immigrants a year.
'People in our country illegally can self-deport the easy way, or they can get deported the hard way. And that's not pleasant,' Trump said in a video posted to a White House social account.
'A big part of it is to create the sense of fear so people will self-deport,' said Jimmy Gomez, a Trump critic and Democratic member of Congress representing Los Angeles.
The ripple effect is that school communities are experiencing fear and trauma, worried that agents will descend on or near campuses.
Most in the state's public school systems, including in L.A. Unified have embraced a counter mission, protecting the right of children — regardless of immigration status — to a public education. That right to an education is, so far, protected by past U.S. Supreme Court rulings.
For most school officials up and down the state, a necessary corollary to that right is safeguarding students' guardians and close relatives.
On Tuesday, 30 school board members from L.A. County — which has 80 school districts — convened in Hawthorne to emphasize their own focus on protecting immigrant families.
'We're about to welcome students back to schools, but we're very concerned that these fears and anxieties may potentially have an impact for students not wanting to come back,' said Lynwood Unified school board member Alma Castro, an organizer of the event.
She called her district a 'safe haven.' Among other measures, her district has trained staff to 'restrict the sharing of any student files, any student information, and there's been some work with thinking about our facilities to ensure that we have campuses that are closed off, that people can't just walk in.'
L.A. Unified, with about 400,000 students, has been layering on protections for months, recently working to incorporate ideas advocated by the teachers union and immigrant-rights groups.
A major ongoing effort is building safe-passage networks one, two and three blocks out from a campus. Participants include paid outside groups, district employees and volunteer activists. School police — though diminished in numbers due to staffing cuts — are to patrol sensitive areas and are on call to move quickly to where situations arise. Some anti-police activists want the protective mission accomplished without any role for school police.
A safe-passage presence has expanded from 40 schools last year to at least 100 this year, among about 1,000 campuses total, Carvalho said.
'It is virtually impossible, considering the size of our community, to ensure that we have one caring, compassionate individual in every street corner in every street,' Carvalho said. 'But we are deploying resources at a level never before seen in our district.'
Other various efforts include:
Carvalho and leaders of other school districts reiterated that K-12 campuses and anything related to schooling, such as a school bus or a graduation ceremony, will be off limits to immigration agents unless they have a valid judicial warrant for a specific individual — which has been rare.
'We do not know what the enrollment will be like,' Carvalho said. 'We know many parents may have already left our community. They may have self-deported... We hope that through our communication efforts, our awareness efforts, information and the direct counseling with students and parents, that we'll be able to provide stable attendance for kids in our community.'
Mary, a Los Angeles mother of three without legal status, was terrified, but more or less knew what to do when immigration agents came to her door twice in May for a 'wellness check' on her children: She did not let them in to her home. She did not step outside.
And, eventually, the agents — at least eight of them who arrived with at least three vehicles — left.
Mary had learned about what to do in this situation from her Los Angeles public school.
Mary, who requested that her full name not be used, has three children, one of whom attends an Alliance College-Ready charter school, a network of 26 privately operated public schools.
Like L.A. Unified, Alliance has trained staff on the legal rights of immigrants and also trained parents about how to handle encounters with immigration agents and where to go for help.
Alliance largely serves low-income, Latino communities and the immigration raids affected attendance in the school last year. Normally, attendance runs about 90% at the end of their school year. This June, average daily attendance at 14 Alliance high schools had dipped below 80%. Six fell below 70% and one dropped as low as 57.5%.
Alliance also attempted to gather deportation data. Nine families responded in a school network that enrolls about 13,000. In two cases, students were deported; three other students had family members deported; one student and a sibling were in a family that self-deported; one student was detained; two families reported facing deportation proceedings.
While these numbers are small, the reports are more than enough to heighten fear within the community. And some families may have declined to be candid about their circumstances.
'What's happening now is that no one is safe anywhere, not even in your home, at work, outside, taking a stroll,' L.A. school board member Rocio Rivas said in an interview.
Still, Rivas is encouraging families to send children to school, which she considers safer than other places.
Alliance is focusing heavily on mental-health support and also arranging carpools to and from school — in which the driver is a U.S. citizen, said Omar Reyes, a superintendent of instruction at the Alliance charter group.
Carvalho, a onetime undocumented immigrant himself, said that students deserve a traditional and joyous first day followed by a school year without trauma.
Children, he said, 'inherently deserve dignity, humanity, love, empathy, compassion and great education.
Times staff writer Andrea Castillo contributed to this report.