In L.A., Fear of ICE Raids Put the First Day of School On Edge

On Thursday morning, educators fanned out to Los Angeles public schools to do many of the things that are done every year on the first day of school to help families feel safe. They high-fived students and greeted parents dropping off their children.

But this year, there was another task at hand: Looking out for federal immigration agents.

As more than half a million students headed back to Los Angeles Unified School District campuses this week, the mood was tense against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s immigration raids. But district and local leaders sought to reassure students and their families with a vast mobilization of officials and community organizations.

School district employees helped patrol the areas around schools in neighborhoods that have been the scene of raids in recent weeks.

At Charles Maclay Middle School in Pacoima, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in the eastern San Fernando Valley, parents and students were greeted by about a dozen staff members and volunteers holding signs in English and Spanish with messages of support.

A school staff member handed out bright orange “Know Your Rights” fliers, while the beat of an Aztec drum provided a soundtrack.

Volunteers in S.U.V.s and vans cruised the streets outside the school, watching for any signs of immigration officials. They were looking for unmarked vehicles with out-of-state plates, and drivers wearing vests and face masks. School district police officers in their own S.U.V.s did the same.

The roving patrols are one of several steps officials in the nation’s second-largest school district have taken in response to the federal raids.

Social workers, counselors and others have reached out to more than 10,000 families at risk of being targeted by immigration enforcement, including many whose children stopped coming to school late last school year, district officials said. They said district staff would distribute a “Family Preparedness” package, which would include information about immigrants’ rights as well as instructions on how to designate alternate caretakers if parents are detained.

School administrators have been trained in what to do if federal agents show up on campus. Bus routes have been altered or added to ensure hundreds of children whose parents are afraid to be on the street can still get to school. In total, more than 1,000 school district staff members were dispatched to help with the effort.

“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,” Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said at a news conference on Monday, where he was flanked by local mayors and labor leaders. “But we are deploying resources at a level never before seen in our district.”

Mr. Carvalho, a Portuguese immigrant who was once undocumented himself, has been an outspoken critic of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics.

On Thursday morning, the superintendent waited for students and parents at the end of a red carpet lined with balloons in front of 24th Street Elementary School in South Los Angeles. Rampage, the mascot for the Los Angeles Rams, jumped and waved. Pop songs blasted over speakers.

Parents said they were comforted by the welcome during a stressful time.

“They’re targeting the Hispanic communities, so it’s scary,” said Margarita Contreras, who was dropping off one son in second grade before walking her eighth grader to the charter middle school next door. “But I want to bring him to school. I want him to be here. It’s important.”

District officials said they worried that a decline in attendance could affect hard-won academic strides that students have made in the aftermath of the pandemic.

School leaders and volunteers said they were not seeking physical confrontations with armed federal agents. They instead wanted to build a robust alert system to warn school administrators, families and immigrant rights advocates of any potential raids.

The efforts will continue as long as officials and staff feel they are necessary — and as long as community members can sustain them, said Maria Miranda, the elementary school vice president at United Teachers Los Angeles, the union that represents educators in the district.

“We don’t know if it’s going to mean a few weeks, if it is going to be a few months or if it will be for three years that we need to have our community organized,” she said.

Educators are allowed to bar federal agents from school sites in California unless the agents have a judicial warrant, said Tony Thurmond, the state’s top education official. And the state legislature is considering a bill that would tighten restrictions on immigration agents’ access to school areas and to personal information about students and staff members.

“We’re sending a message to the Trump administration: This is not what we need,” said Mr. Thurmond, who visited classrooms on Thursday with Mr. Carvalho at 24th Street Elementary School. “Don’t disrupt our education.”

For thousands of families in Los Angeles Unified, which has a student body that is nearly three-quarters Latino and which includes some of the densest immigrant communities in the country, fear muted the summer break.

“Prior to that point, we were preparing for anything, but it wasn’t quite clear how far the administration would go,” said Kelly Gonez, a Los Angeles Unified board member. “When we started to see these mass and violent raids and abductions of citizens by masked men, we realized this was a five-alarm fire.”

By June, as reports proliferated of federal agents arresting street vendors, day laborers and carwash workers seemingly at random, many Latinos across Los Angeles avoided leaving their homes. Undocumented parents and relatives of students missed graduations for fear of being separated from their loved ones.

The immigration raids slowed somewhat last month after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop making indiscriminate arrests. But in recent days, the pace of attention-grabbing incidents seems to have ramped up.

This week, on the same day that school district officials held their news conference, a 15-year-old high school student with significant disabilities was detained by federal agents at Arleta High School, in the San Fernando Valley. He was there with his grandmother and sibling for class registration.

Ms. Gonez, the board member who represents the area, said that federal agents drew their guns and that the teenager was handcuffed. At some point during the encounter, she said, it appeared that bullets were dropped onto the ground, although the weapons were not fired.

The student’s grandmother was able to intervene and tell agents that the student was not the person that agents said they were looking for, and he was released, Ms. Gonez said.

“There’s the cruelty and the inhumanity,” she said, “and then just incompetence.”

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in an email that federal agents were not targeting the high school and that they had been conducting a “targeted operation” to find Cristian Alexander Vasquez-Alvarenga, a Salvadoran national who she said was related to the teenager.

She said that thanks to the help of “family members who worked with Border Patrol,” Mr. Vasquez-Alvarenga had been arrested. According to a social media post by the head of the federal operation in the Los Angeles area, Mr. Vasquez-Alvarenga had a 2021 misdemeanor conviction for carrying a concealed weapon.