F.B.I. agents raided the headquarters of the Los Angeles Unified School District and the home of its superintendent on Wednesday, federal authorities said.
F.B.I. officials said that the agency was executing search warrants at the school district and at the home of the superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, but that the accompanying affidavits had been sealed by the court. They did not elaborate on the target of the investigation.
Mr. Carvalho did not respond to a request for comment. Los Angeles Unified said in a statement that it was aware of the activity at Mr. Carvalho’s home and the district’s headquarters, and that it was cooperating with federal authorities.
The F.B.I.’s office in Miami, where Mr. Carvalho served as superintendent before coming to Los Angeles, said in a statement that it had searched a home in the town of Southwest Ranches, in Broward County, as part of the investigation. The statement did not provide an address for the residence; property records show that Mr. Carvalho owns two properties in Broward County, although neither is in Southwest Ranches.
The F.B.I. search of the high-rise building near downtown Los Angeles that serves as the headquarters of the district was limited to part of a single floor that houses the superintendent’s offices, according to a school district official who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a legal matter.
It’s unclear what the F.B.I. is investigating. The Los Angeles school district is home to about 400,000 students, and Mr. Carvalho, as superintendent, has one of the highest-profile jobs in K-12 education. He earns a salary of $440,000 a year.
Federal prosecutors had been looking into AllHere, a tech start-up that had secured a $6 million contract with the Los Angeles school district for an A.I. chatbot but filed for bankruptcy in 2024. It was not clear if the F.B.I. searches on Wednesday were related to the AllHere investigation.
The Trump administration also has had contentious relations in general with Los Angeles and California, where Democratic leaders have clashed with the administration’s hostility to diversity, equity and inclusion and have been among the president’s more vocal critics.
The Justice Department joined a federal lawsuit alleging that a longstanding desegregation program at Los Angeles Unified discriminated against white students. But that case is not a criminal case, and it would have been unlikely to have resulted in a search warrant targeting the home of the superintendent.
The superintendent has also clashed with federal authorities in the past over immigration enforcement efforts at school sites in Los Angeles Unified, which is the nation’s second-largest school district and the largest in California.
Last year, after Homeland Security Investigations agents were turned away from two Los Angeles elementary schools where they said they were conducting welfare checks on undocumented students, Mr. Carvalho condemned their actions at a news conference that drew national attention.
Explaining his impassioned response, Mr. Carvalho, a native of Portugal, said that as a young man, he had been undocumented for a time in this country.
After high school, he had moved to New York, he said, and overstayed his visitor visa, working at restaurants, farms and construction sites and even falling into homelessness for a time. After about two years, he said, he secured a student visa and proper documentation and eventually went on to become a physics teacher. He is now a U.S. citizen.
The federal raid on Mr. Carvalho’s home comes less than six months after federal authorities arrested the Guyana-born superintendent of the Des Moines school system, Ian Roberts, amid charges that he was illegally living and working in the United States.
Mr. Carvalho came to Los Angeles in 2022 after 14 years of leading the public school system in Miami. He is known as a strong supporter of immigrant students. Under his leadership, Los Angeles Unified demonstrated improvements in test scores and greater participation in Advanced Placement courses.
But his career has also been marked by high-profile missteps. In Miami, leaked emails suggested that he had an inappropriate relationship with a reporter covering education. In 2018, he accepted a job leading the nation’s largest school system, in New York City, but then abruptly backed out on live television.
In Los Angeles, there have been persistent questions about how the district has awarded contracts.
In 2023, the district agreed to pay AllHere to develop an A.I. chatbot for students and parents. The company had little experience with A.I. and the software was glitchy. AllHere entered bankruptcy in 2024 and the federal government later charged its chief executive with fraud.
Unionized teachers, who are currently embroiled in contract negotiations with the district and have authorized a strike if they don’t reach an agreement, have taken issue in particular with Los Angeles Unified’s spending on outside contracts for technology.
Patricia Mazzei contributed reporting from Miami.
Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.
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