Agents detain student at gunpoint near school; safe zones to be expanded around LAUSD campuses
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- L.A. school district and city officials announce measures to keep schools safe amid immigration raids.
- A key strategy is to maintain — as much as possible — safe zones near schools.
- Immigration agents on Monday detained a disabled 15-year-old student at gunpoint outside a high school.
Los Angeles school district police, staff and community volunteers will form protective perimeters around at least 100 schools when classes begin Thursday to help ensure the safe passage of children — an announcement that came on a day that immigration agents reportedly handcuffed, detained and drew their guns on a student outside Arleta High School in a case of mistaken identity.
The 15-year-old boy, a student with disabilities, was at Arleta High School on Monday with family members — he attends a different district school — when federal agents detained him, L.A. Unified School District officials said. Family members intervened and, after a few tense moments, the agents released the boy. The school’s principal also came out to assess the situation. Agents left behind some bullets on the sidewalk, apparently by mistake, which were collected by school police.
“Such actions — violently detaining a child just outside a public school — are absolutely reprehensible and should have no place in our country,” school board member Kelly Gonez, who represents Arleta High, said in a social media post.
A spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security could not immediately be reached for comment.
Across Los Angeles Unified, parents, teachers and staff have expressed deep fears about school safety amid immigration raids. Citywide, leaders are concerned that children whose parents are living in the country without legal status will be kept home as families grapple with the climate of fear.
L.A. schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho spoke Monday at a news conference with Mayor Karen Bass near district headquarters. He said the district is doubling down on efforts to protect students and families by creating and expanding “safe zones” around campuses, before and after school, and that everyone must come together to protect the most vulnerable.
“There are no sidewalks for immigrants and separate sidewalks for everybody else,” Carvalho said. “Everybody walks the same journey to school and everybody walks ... back home.”
For the first day, Carvalho will deploy central and regional office staff across the school system, an effort mirrored by organizers in the teachers union, who are gathering volunteers to patrol the streets around schools. Safe passage zones have been expanded from about 40 at the start of the prior school year to more than 100. The school district has close to 1,000 campuses.
These safety zones — and school police patrols — will target areas most affected by immigration enforcement.
Bass was not specific about what role the Los Angeles Police Department would play.
“The school police and the Los Angeles Police Department have a strong working relationship and will continue to share information as appropriate as needed,” Bass said. “But neither police departments assist with immigration enforcement and have not for many, many years. There will be adults in the community who will serve as eyes and ears on the street.”
Also speaking at the news conference were mayors from South Gate, Huntington Park, Bell, West Hollywood and Vernon.
Los Angeles Unified covers an area totaling 710 square miles, which includes most of the city of Los Angeles and takes in all or portions of 25 other cities and unincorporated areas.
“The Bell Police Department will be patrolling throughout the City of Bell at all our schools,” Mayor Ali Saleh said. “I will definitely be there myself to make sure that our students are protected and make sure that they’re able to go from their homes to school and protected.”
Vernon Mayor Leticia Lopez said officers will be “monitoring traffic around the school before and after, with special attention to crosswalks for children.” Police will be “making periodic visits to the campus throughout the day to offer a visible public safety presence, and ... responding to calls for service at the school on behalf of the LAUSD Police Department, allowing LAUSD officers to focus on other campuses.”
Although local police are not legally allowed to stop or interfere with federal law enforcement actions, authorities will alert parents along walking routes if agents are in the area. Also, they will trigger a communication chain to alert all nearby campuses of raids so that schools can be locked down as necessary.
The public commitment was intended to reassure families that school will be a safe place and that officials also will do what they can to protect families on their way to and from campuses.
In a string of recent appearances, Carvalho has reviewed measures taken by the nation’s second-largest school system.
These included home visits or calls in recent weeks to more than 10,000 families considered at risk of immigration enforcement or at risk of not coming to school. The school system also is distributing family preparedness packets — “all the information in one single form, in a multitude of languages,” said Carvalho, with the goal of “explaining the rights of our children and their parents, but also providing easy access to the resources that we have available to all of them.”
The district also has created a “compassion fund” to provide general help for families, including legal assistance.
In addition to students from immigrant families, the school system has more than 350 employees who are working legally but who could have their legal status revoked.
“They continue to be ... valiant, productive workers,” Carvalho said last week.
The district is working to reroute buses to make transportation more accessible to families. For the most part, the busing system is used by students with disabilities — for whom transportation is legally required — and students attending magnet programs at campuses far from where they live.
But this could change when the parameter for riding a bus is safety. In this light, neighborhood proximity to bus stops matters a lot, because families can be exposed to immigration enforcement while traveling to and from a stop.
The buses themselves will be considered an extension of the campus environment and federal agents will not be permitted to board them.
Carvalho also acknowledged that immigration agents cannot be denied entry if they have a valid judicial warrant for an individual, although these are rare.
The Monday news conference took place at Roybal Learning Center, just west of downtown. That facility also serves as the headquarters of the L.A. Unified School Police Department, which is expected to have a role in monitoring immigration enforcement and potentially confronting it.
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