A 15-year-old disabled student was detained by armed ICE agents while trying to attend high school orientation due to a case of ‘mistaken identity.’
Unidentified immigration agents handcuffed, detained and drew their guns at the special needs student outside Arleta High School in Los Angeles.
The ICE raid took place at around 9:30 am on Monday, just days before over half a million LAUSD students are set to return to classrooms.
According to Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, the San Fernando High School student was at Arleta High School with his grandmother to accompany a relative registering for classes there.
While the student and his grandmother waited in the car for the family member to return, multiple offers approached the vehicle, insisting that they were not with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
However, video footage of the incident was reviewed by the district and allegedly showed both police and Border Patrol personnel present at the scene.
The boy was taken out of the car and put in handcuffs on the sidewalk.
He was eventually released after staff members from the school and Los Angeles police intervened.
‘The release will not release him from what he experienced,’ Carvalho said during a news conference. ‘The trauma will linger. It will not cease. It is unacceptable, not only in our community, but anywhere in America.’
Other parents of children attending schools within LAUSD are concerned for the safety of their own children.
Parents worry that their kids will be targeted by immigration officers for the color of their skin, with no regard for their actual immigration status.
‘He fits that category,’ LAUSD parent Yvonne said of her child. ‘Where he’s on the darker side, and I feel like that’s who they’re attacking… that’s the main reason I tell him you better be careful and you don’t go with anybody.’
Yvonne said she was upset over the incident because children shouldn’t be scared of going to school, and parents shouldn’t be worried about dropping them off, ‘We shouldn’t be going through this,’ she told KTLA.
Soon after the teenager was wrongly detained, parents received a recorded voice message from the principal, saying: ‘We are aware of reports of immigration enforcement activity in the area, near our campus. Our school has not been contacted by any federal agency.’
‘As our students return to school, we are calling on every community partner to help ensure that classrooms remain places of learning and belonging,’ Carvalho said.
‘Children have been through enough – from the pandemic to natural disasters. They should not have to carry the added weight of fear when walking through their school gates.’
Mayor Karen Bass joined district officials at Monday’s press conference, saying, ‘We are gathered here today to talk about protecting our children from the federal government. This is a profound moment… the fact that we even need a press conference to talk about strategies for how we protect our kids.’
Kelly Gonez, an LA Unified School District board member said in a statement, ‘Such actions – violently detaining a child just outside a public school – are absolutely reprehensible and should have no place in our country.’
‘I denounce these violent aggressions’ and the ‘continued unconstitutional targeting of our Latino community,’ Gonez said.
Going into the school year, the district has reportedly contacted 10,000 families potentially impacted by immigration enforcement efforts.
LAUSD has rerouted bus stops, deployed 1,000 central office staff to assist in school zones and increased online learning options for those too scared to leave their houses.
These measures come amidst growing tensions between migrant communities and ICE officers as Trump continues to ramp up his immigration policies.
Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’, enacted on July 4, provided $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement, while ICE has been tasked with significantly increasing arrests and deportations.
Quotas are reportedly set at 1,200 to 1,500 arrests per day.
Immigrants across the US live in fear of being wrongly targeted by ICE despite living in the US legally, as officers have wrongly targeted multiple US citizens during Trump’s raids, as occurred outside Arleta High School on Monday.
