The FBI served a court-authorized warrant on Feb. 25 at the home and district office of Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, according to the agency.
The nature of the search was not immediately disclosed.
“The affidavit in support of the warrant has been sealed by the court, and we, therefore, have no further comment,” the FBI’s national press office told The Epoch Times.
The Los Angeles Police Department was not involved in the operation, which included searching the downtown offices of the second-largest school district in the nation, according to a spokesman who referred questions to the FBI.
Los Angeles Unified School District officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for information about the search.
Carvalho has served as superintendent of the district since February 2022, after leading the Miami-Dade County Public Schools for 14 years, where he earned several state and national honors.
The district has seen a significant decline in enrollment in the 2025–2026 academic year, reporting a drop of about 9,500 students to around 398,500.
Carvalho and the school district are facing legal challenges on two fronts.
Last year, a group of district students and former district Superintendent Austin Beutner filed a lawsuit claiming Carvalho and the district misused nearly $77 million in Proposition 28 funds raised for arts and music education.
California voters passed the proposition in 2022 to provide more funds for arts and music education and allow school districts to hire more arts and music teachers and aides at all campuses to increase instruction. The district has denied any wrongdoing, saying it was complying with the requirements of the proposition.
In other recent action, the Justice Department joined a civil rights lawsuit earlier this month filed against Carvalho and the district challenging a taxpayer-funded program that allegedly uses racial demographics to determine school funding.
The lawsuit, filed in the Los Angeles District Court by the 1776 Project Foundation, claims the district’s Predominantly Hispanic, Black, Asian, or other Non-Anglo (PHBAO) Program categorizes student residents within the district into two groups: “Anglo,” meaning white, and “non-Anglo.”
Carvalho has been outspoken about coming to the United States as an illegal immigrant from Portugal in the 1980s to escape poverty.
In a television interview, he told CBS News in 2017, “over my dead body will any federal entity enter our schools to take immigration actions against our kids.”
He also shared his personal story with The 74, a nonprofit news organization covering America’s education system, saying he was one of six children who grew up in “very poor circumstances” before earning enough money to come to the United States.
“I was able to, at some point, work toward a student visa with a work permit attached,” he said. “That was with the assistance of a Republican congressman who has since died, but I’ve paid homage to him in a lot of my conversations. That was Congressman E. Clay Shaw. He helped me legalize my immigration status in this country. This person saw beyond status; this person saw a human being with a desire to do something for himself, and he assisted me.”
Cavalho said he intended to pay it forward and go to medical school, but had to work first and went into education.
