Five years ago, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) “defunded” its school police force, bowing to the left. Now, it is using school police to thwart alleged Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids.
The LAUSD announced Monday that it would be using the Los Angeles School Police Department to set up perimeters around school graduation ceremonies, ostensibly to protect parents and students from ICE raids.
Parents received telephone calls from school officials notifying them that LAUSD “personnel and school partners” would be attending graduation ceremonies, including from elementary schools in the district.
The Los Angeles Times added:
Los Angeles school police will set up a safety perimeter around campuses and school events — including graduations — to keep federal immigration agents away from students, employees and families, school officials said Monday.
The announcement by Supt. Alberto Carvalho comes amid widespread immigration raids in Los Angeles — including one on Monday at a Home Depot adjacent to Huntington Park High School — after a weekend of isolated but intense downtown clashes between police and protesters, some of whom set self-driving Waymo cars on fire and threw rocks and fireworks.
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Carvalho did not rule out the potential for a standoff involving school police if federal officers attempted to enter a school or an off-campus school event — such as a graduation ceremony — without a judicial warrant.
The Times omitted the fact that “protesters” (i.e. rioters) also attacked law enforcement officers, vandalized public and private property, and looted local businesses.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 7: Protesters looting a gas station store during immigration protest on June 7, 2025 in Paramount, California. Clashes between the U.S. Border Patrol and protestors began after a Home Depot was raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Around 30 agents wearing tactical gear were stationed near a Home Depot in Paramount and faced off against protesters, south of downtown Los Angeles.(Photo by Apu Gomes/Getty Images)
Moreover, the Times never noted the fact that fears of ICE raids at graduation are completely unfounded, and are based on fake news spread across social media by a TikTok user.
Left-leaning Snopes debunked the myth:
On June 6, 2025, a claim circulated online that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had raided an elementary school graduation in Los Angeles.
The claims circulated ahead of a weekend of protests in the city following ICE raids on June 6. The claim likely stemmed from a TikTok video (archived) uploaded by @justsayuhatebasketball on TikTok.
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However, though local and national media reported on immigration enforcement action in LA and resulting protests around June 6-8, 2025, we found no evidence ICE made arrests at Gratts Learning Academy for Young Scholars on June 6, as the TikTok user above claimed. A spokesperson for Los Angeles Unified, the school district where Gratts Learning Academy was located, said via email that the graduation ceremony at the school on June 6, seen in its online calendar, “continued without any disruption.”
In a further irony, LAUSD actually “defunded” its school police force, under pressure from Black Lives Matter protests, in the aftermath of the last round of riots in L.A. The activists — some of whom, presumably, would be among today’s activists opposing ICE in the city — claimed children were unsafe around police at school.
In March 2021, as Breitbart News reported, the LAUSD board — including so-called “reformers” such as Nick Melvoin — voted to cut the school police force by 35% and to use the cash to help black students, in part by hiring so-called “climate coaches” to push back against what activists described as “implicit bias” at schools.
Having “defunded” the police, ostensibly to protect minority students, the LAUSD is now trying to use the same police force to protect those same students against an imaginary threat of ICE raids at graduation.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
