This School District Is Preparing ‘Lockdowns’ — But Now It’s Not Just For Shootings

Clemen Avalos, a school psychologist at an elementary school in the San Fernando Valley, is seeing a lot more kids crying at school this year. They are used to seeing preschoolers or kindergarteners struggle to say goodbye to their parents during the first couple of days of school. But now, several weeks into the year, they have older kids coming to their office in tears.

One fifth-grader told Avalos she is scared and wants to go home. Her mom sells tamales on the street, she kept repeating.

Avalos understood how the girl was feeling. As a Mexican American growing up in California during the 1994 fight to deny public services to undocumented immigrants, she remembers hearing, “The migra is going to take you back to Mexico.” Once, when their mom was pulled over, they burst into tears, believing the police would take their mother away and they would never see her again.

“I remember that so vividly as a 37-year-old woman,” they told HuffPost.

Teachers and school staff saw how fearful students were during the first Trump administration — but this time, the anxiety has been inescapable.

During his second campaign, Donald Trump threatened to carry out the “largest deportation program” in the country’s history. In June, federal agents were deployed to Los Angeles and have since arrested thousands of people, including students, U.S. citizens, and people with legal authorization to be in the country. On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that federal agents could continue targeting “any alien or person believed to be an alien” — overturning a previous order by a federal judge who found that ICE agents were unconstitutionally arresting people based on their race, accent or line of work.

Students are full of questions: What will happen if ICE shows up on campus? What will their teachers do to protect them?

Los Angeles schools, which include 30,000 immigrant students, 7,500 of whom are undocumented, are particularly vulnerable to immigration raids. Each day, students and their parents travel to and from school at a predictable time, risking apprehension by federal agents.

But in some ways, schools are uniquely prepared to respond to this threat. Both educators and students have been forced to learn lockdown and shelter-in-place policies designed to protect them from active shooters or natural disasters — and some of these precautions are now being repurposed to protect them from federal immigration authorities. And many educators have also spent the summer participating in community defense efforts, which they are now expanding to their schools.

In June, Avalos helped lead a training by Unión del Barrio, a political organization that has conducted community patrols to defend people from immigration raids since the 1990s. The training, attended by members of dozens of community groups, including United Teachers Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Tenants Union, Jewish Voices for Peace and the Harriet Tubman Center, helped create a coalition of volunteers who could carry out community patrols across the county.

By the first day of school, UTLA members had set up patrols around schools, distributed know-your-rights information, worked with the Los Angeles Unified School District to offer adjusted bus routes that pick kids up closer to home, and pushed the district to offer virtual learning options.

“A lot of people are freaking out,” Lupe Carrasco Cardona, a high school ethnic studies teacher in downtown Los Angeles, told HuffPost. “But I always remind everyone that the hope is in the coalition. We have organizations that normally don’t organize around immigration issues but believe strongly in being part of the defense that have joined. That’s where I find the most light and hope.”

On the first day of school, a sweltering Thursday in August, Cardona set up at her patrol spot after school. From her perch, she could count each student as they boarded their buses home, scanning the streets for any signs of immigration enforcement.

On that day, they all got onto buses safely.

Cardona joined Unión del Barrio in 2015 and started participating in street patrols in East Los Angeles and South Central in 2020. At the height of the immigration raids over the summer, Unión del Barrio’s rapid response hotline rang constantly, sometimes until 3 a.m.

“People [were] calling to say, ‘I can’t work. I have no food,’” Cardona said. In response, the group fundraised and partnered with Superior Grocers to distribute $16,000 worth of groceries.

Just before school started, the nightmare scenario organizers had been preparing for happened. On Aug. 8, Benjamin Marcelo Guerrero-Cruz, an 18-year-old student from Van Nuys, was walking his dog when he was detained by masked ICE agents. The teen is currently being held at a desert detention center, and federal officials have not explained why he was stopped in the first place. On Aug. 11, another student, a 15-year-old with disabilities, was handcuffed and briefly held at a San Fernando Valley high school with his mom before agents let him go.

After the arrests, Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho announced that the district would deploy its staff and school police to form protection perimeters around about 100 schools in areas targeted by immigration enforcement. (During Trump’s first presidency, the district said ICE wasn’t allowed on campuses — and adopted a resolution declaring itself a sanctuary district after the November election.)

Attendance on the first day was 2% higher than it was last year, Carvalho said in a press conference, citing this as a testament to the safeguards the district and volunteer groups have put in place to protect students.

Union members have called for a policy of campus lockdowns in the event that ICE agents show up at schools. Previously, “the basic understanding was that unless [ICE] had a warrant for the school and for someone who is at the school, they can’t come on campus,” said Skye Tooley, an elementary school teacher in East Hollywood and a UTLA member, noting that two district elementary schools had turned away Homeland Security agents who tried to conduct “wellness checks” on five students in April.

Now, “if ICE tries to come on campus even without a warrant, most schools now have a procedure in place for lockdown,” Tooley said. “If there was a shooter of some sort on campus, that’s basically how we’re treating ICE.”

LAUSD declined to respond to a list of questions, including whether the district mandates lockdowns if immigration authorities show up at a school. A district spokesperson who declined to be named said in a statement, “Working closely with city leaders and municipal partners, we have strengthened safety measures at and around our schools. This includes enhanced communication with various entities, visible presence in impacted communities, and rapid-response protocols should enforcement activity occur.”

“Our message is clear: every child belongs in school, and we will do everything in our power to keep our campuses safe, supportive, and welcoming for all,” the spokesperson continued.

Members of the teachers union, UTLA, have applauded the district’s efforts to create “safe zones” to protect students, mirroring UTLA’s own patrol system. But many also say the district could do more to support its students — particularly those who have upcoming immigration hearings or have been deported — and to better train all kinds of school employees, including substitutes.

Maria Miranda, a former teacher and the elementary vice president of UTLA, noted that some union members are worried that, because enrollment in some classes is down as some students fear immigration raids outside of schools, this could result in teachers being reassigned or classes being cut altogether. The district conducted its official enrollment count to determine any class changes on what is known as “Norm Day” on Sept. 12.

“We don’t need that kind of instability right now,” Miranda said. “We hope there is some kind of agreement to limit possible [teacher] displacements because it can’t be business as usual this year.”

There has been a 7% increase in enrollment for online courses during the first week of school this year, but most students have returned to campus, potentially because they were sick of being cooped up at home all summer during the raids.

“A mom of one of my students told me how bored the family was because they couldn’t leave the house,” Cardona said. “They usually go to the library, community pool and beach visits as a family. But their neighborhood was hit by ICE raids. They could look out the window and see these things happening.”

On the first day of school, teachers were joined by other community organizers who had spent the summer patrolling in front of Home Depots and parks where federal agents targeted day laborers and street vendors. Just days before school started, Border Patrol agents jumped out of a Penske moving truck in the Westlake Home Depot parking lot and arrested more than a dozen immigrants, an action lawyers described as a violation of a federal court order.

That Home Depot is regularly patrolled by volunteers from the Los Angeles Tenants Union, which fights for safe, affordable housing in LA. Zoie Matthew, an organizer with the Koreatown local of LATU, sees the immigration raids and tenants rights as inextricably linked issues. The workers being snatched off the streets are forced to choose between “putting yourself in danger looking for work or putting yourself in danger of eviction by staying home,” said Matthew, calling for an eviction moratorium in response to the immigration raids.

Matthew patrols the area near the Home Depot most mornings, starting at 6:30 a.m. She has repurposed the binoculars she got for bird-watching to spot suspicious-looking vehicles. Starting on Aug. 14, Matthew and the other LATU volunteers expanded their patrol routes to include the perimeters of the three schools neighboring the Home Depot.

Still shaken by the Penske truck raid earlier that month, they discussed how horrible it would be for something similar to happen while hundreds of kids were on their way to school. They feared that immigration agents would weaponize school drop-off and pick-up times to round up parents in the predominantly Latino neighborhood. Some kids, the volunteers said, didn’t even have parents to walk them to school, either because they had been arrested or didn’t feel safe leaving the house.

During their patrol, Matthew and another tenants union volunteer crossed paths with teachers union members and volunteers from the Central American Resource Center and discussed ways to collaborate. At one point, they introduced themselves to a crossing guard and asked where the best place was to have people looking out. The crossing guard, who stopped to hug a young student she recognized, noted that there seemed to be fewer people than usual walking around. She suspected that some people were scared to come out. Matthew gave her a phone number to use to report any suspected ICE activity. They thanked each other for their work. It’s up to the people to look out for each other now, they agreed.

Two weeks later, Border Patrol agents raided the Westlake Home Depot a fourth time, this time using tear gas and pepper balls, local outlet LA Taco reported. Agents entered on a street less than a block from a middle school just before 7 a.m., Matthew said, noting that there was a school bus in the background of the video she filmed of the incident.

So far, Miranda is not aware of immigration authorities gaining access to any of LAUSD’s campuses but suspected agents have been spotted driving near schools. Still, teachers and community advocates want to be prepared.

Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which gives the Department of Homeland Security billions of dollars in additional funding, goes into effect next month. “We anticipate that in October things are going to get much worse,” Avalos said. “So we are really focused on trying to train as many educators and communities as possible so that everybody can take this work and apply it to their neighborhood.”

Cardona believes that the organizing efforts in LA can be a model for other cities where federal authorities may shift their attention next. Earlier this month, the Trump administration began an immigration enforcement operation in Massachusetts after signaling that it would deploy the National Guard to Chicago.

“Just because you haven’t come across ICE yet doesn’t mean that you won’t. We’re in it for the long haul,” she said. “The more that we can organize upfront, once all the structures are in place, when you are confronted with a situation, I can teach comfortably knowing that the gate is locked.”