Alberto Carvalho, Superintendent, Los Angeles Unified School District:
Thank you very much for the opportunity.
All I can tell you is that teams of four agents showed up at two different schools two hours apart. We, in fact, believe that these individuals belong to the same team.
They — after being asked by the principals to provide some degree of identification, they did present credentials that identify them as agents of the Department of Homeland Security, which they went to great lengths to actually explain to the principals that they were not with ICE.
The problem began when, number one, they failed to produce a judicial warrant, which we require for any type of access to staff or students in our schools. And, secondly, they blatantly lied because they conveyed to the principals that they had obtained permission from these children’s parents to have access to them in school.
Based on the statement that was released by the Department of Homeland Security after this incident, they actually conveyed that they were there to conduct wellness checks on these children on the basis of their undocumented and unaccompanied status, which contradicts the fact that presumably they would have obtained permission from the parents of these children, which the parents, the guardians, absolutely deny.
