“It Never Leaves You”: Portuguese-American Alberto Carvalho Speaks Out After Federal Agents Visit LA Schools.

When federal agents unexpectedly arrived at two Los Angeles elementary schools last week to conduct what they described as welfare checks on undocumented students, fear spread quickly through classrooms and communities. For Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the visit wasn’t just a policy violation — it was a personal reckoning.

As The New York Times’ Jesus Jiménez reported, Carvalho, who now leads the second-largest public school system in the United States, was once undocumented himself. “Their journey is no different than my own,” he told the Times. “Maybe the country of origin is different, but in many, many instances, the journey is exactly the same.”

Federal agents from Homeland Security Investigations were turned away from Russell and Lillian Street elementary schools in the Florence-Graham neighborhood. According to The New York Times, agents claimed the visits were welfare checks on children who crossed the border unaccompanied, part of a broader effort “to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited, abused and sex trafficked,” according to DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin.

But Carvalho and others say the agents’ conduct was alarming. “And then they lied,” Carvalho told The Times. “They blatantly lied when they asserted to the principals in both schools that they had the children’s parents’ authorization for them to be there and to have access to the children.” McLaughlin, in turn, denied that assertion and said the agents “made it clear this was a welfare check and not an immigration enforcement action.”

Still, the damage was done — both to trust and to the sense of safety schools are supposed to provide. Speaking at a news conference outside the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, Carvalho’s outrage was evident. “If it sounds like I’m coming across with a certain degree of contempt and anger,” he said, “that’s because I am.”

“I’m still mystified,” he continued, “as to how a first, second, third, fourth or sixth grader would pose any type of risk to the national security of our nation.”

That sharp defense of students and families went viral, drawing national attention, in no small part because of the weight of Carvalho’s own story.

As Jiménez reported in The Times, Carvalho was born in Portugal and raised in a household with six siblings and limited formal education. Two of his siblings died young, partly because of poor access to health care. After finishing high school, Carvalho came to the United States on a visitor visa and overstayed.

“I say it not proudly, but it is the truth from which I cannot hide,” he told The Times. “I live it every day.”

What followed were years of survival. He washed dishes in Manhattan, picked crops, worked construction sites in Florida — and for a time, lived in a U-Haul truck under a bridge in Miami. “I really fell into a state that I never thought I would find myself in,” he said. “Imagine: You’re poor. You don’t have a place to go, and you think that someone is always looking for you.”

Eventually, he secured a student visa and Social Security number, opening a path to work legally. “That was a milestone,” he recalled. “I felt like the luckiest human being ever.”

From there, his rise was dramatic: from physics teacher to principal, then superintendent of Miami-Dade schools for 14 years, before taking the helm in Los Angeles in 2022.

But none of that erases the memory of what it means to be undocumented — a truth he carries with him as a leader, and as a protector of children now facing the same fears he once lived.

“When you’re born poor, that state of mind never leaves you,” Carvalho said. “If you were once undocumented, that level of concern for yourself and for others never leaves you, either.”

Immigrant rights groups quickly rallied behind Carvalho’s stance. “We certainly see the superintendent as an ally,” said Alvaro Huerta of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. “The fact that he was undocumented and was able to rise to the level of the superintendent of one of the biggest school districts in the country is just an amazing immigrant story, and there’s so many like him.”

For Carvalho, the visit from federal agents wasn’t just an institutional breach — it was a moment that reopened an old wound and reminded him that the past is never truly past.

“It never leaves you,” he said. “And it shouldn’t.”