Before sunrise in Los Angeles, educators and volunteers are back on the streets, watching for possible immigration sweeps as the school year begins. At 6.58 am, Ingrid Villeda and Olga drove through southside neighborhoods before classes started at hundreds of schools, and Villeda photographed the license plates of one of two black pickup trucks they suspected could belong to ICE agents.
What they are doing is not a one-off show of concern. Villeda and Olga said they did not miss a single day last school year of what they call community patrols, part of a wider network of teachers, school staff, activists and community members moving through Los Angeles school neighborhoods to warn families before students and parents can be detained. Their effort is aimed at the kind of fear that has built around the Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves more than 370,000 students and is about 70% Hispanic.
That fear is not abstract. Since last year, ICE agents have detained at least two students connected to LAUSD. In August 2025, agents held a 15-year-old Hispanic teen with special needs at gunpoint outside Arleta High School after mistaking him for someone they were seeking. In another case, Benjamin Marcelo Guerrero Cruz, 18, was intercepted by masked agents while walking his dog, taken to the detention center in Adelanto and later moved to another immigration facility in Arizona without his parents’ knowledge. At one point, authorities considered sending him to Louisiana, more than 400 miles away.
The patrols are a response to the intensified plan of mass arrests and deportations that followed last summer, and they reflect how deeply immigration enforcement has entered the school day in south Los Angeles and the southside neighborhoods of the city. Olga said they keep going because it affects their families and children, because parents are afraid to go out, and because a warning can change what happens next on a school morning.
But the patrols also show the limits of what neighborhood watch can do. Even with adults scanning corners before dawn, ICE has still reached students tied to LAUSD, and the district’s families are left relying on fast sightings, quick calls and luck. Villeda put it simply: they cannot take any of our children.
