The 35,000-member United Teachers of Los Angeles drafted plans to commandeer taxpayer-funded school district resources, train students in "community self-defense," and reward them with service learning hours for resisting federal immigration enforcement — all while framing lawful deportation operations as "kidnapping" and "abduction."
Planning documents and materials obtained by the parental rights group Defending Education reveal a union apparatus built not for education but for obstruction. The materials outline protocols for locking down schools when ICE arrives, mobilizing media and rally-goers to surround campuses, and purchasing equipment like bullhorns and "banner making machines" with what appears to be school resources.
UTLA did not respond to queries regarding the documents. The Los Angeles Unified School District distanced itself immediately.
The scope of what UTLA assembled is worth understanding in detail, because it isn't a set of guidelines — it's an operational manual for political resistance, built into the scaffolding of a public school system.
A district guide titled "SCHOOL SAFETY PLAN: RESPONDING TO IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT," last updated August 5, 2025, lays out a protocol that includes putting a school on "lockdown" when federal agents arrive, recording agents who refuse to leave, and activating the union's network. The guide was written in both English and Spanish.
The activation protocol is where things shift from bureaucratic defensiveness to something more aggressive. Red-bar sections in the materials describe UTLA's role upon activation: contacting the Los Angeles Rapid Response Network, notifying elected officials, and alerting the media "to go to school." From there, the plan escalates:
Mobilize to the school for a rally-action. Surround the school with supporters. Media will be invited; media briefing as needed.
This isn't a safety plan. It's a siege manual — designed to turn a school campus into a political theater the moment federal law enforcement exercises its legal authority.
A separate UTLA presentation titled "Preparing for ICE at your school" characterizes any immigration enforcement involving children as "student kidnapping." An "Immigration Enforcement Safety Review" checklist, under the heading "After Crisis Response," asks whether the school has created a system of "mutual aid and support for families who have experienced an abduction."
Abduction. Kidnapping. This is the language UTLA chose to describe the execution of federal removal orders — orders issued by immigration judges, upheld by decades of case law, and backed by the full authority of the United States government.
UTLA claims legal cover through a memorandum of understanding with LAUSD designating school buildings and grounds as "sanctuary spaces." A slide titled "UTLA's response" states the union will defend those spaces "to the extent permitted by law."
The phrase "to the extent permitted by law" is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence, because the law is not on UTLA's side.
The materials include a poster citing three California laws that purportedly bar ICE from using administrative warrants to enter offices or question personnel. Those state laws are likely preempted by federal law. DHS has made its position clear: administrative warrants are valid when accompanied by an immigration judge's final order of removal, Just the News reported. The agency cites the Supreme Court's 1960 Abel precedent, which recognized the "legislative recognition of the propriety of administrative arrest for deportable aliens," and the Fourth Amendment's reasonableness standard —not the form of the warrant.
In other words, UTLA built its resistance infrastructure on a legal foundation that federal courts have already rejected.
The most troubling element isn't the union's own mobilization — it's the recruitment of children into it.
The materials reference "engaging students in community self-defense" and suggest offering service learning hours for participation, which implies counting such activity toward non-academic graduation requirements. A photo described as a "school equipment" brainstorming session suggests purchases of bullhorns and banner-making machines, along with plans to commandeer security cameras.
Consider what this means in practice. A teachers union — the entity entrusted with shaping the academic environment of K-12 students — proposed incentivizing minors to physically and politically resist federal law enforcement. Not as an extracurricular. Not as a civics thought exercise. As a credentialed activity, rewarded with hours toward graduation.
UTLA's own timeline boasts of kicking off a "summer of resistance" with "20 days of non-violent protest and action." That language — "non-violent" — functions as a disclaimer, not a guarantee. When you train students to confront armed federal agents, hand them bullhorns, and surround a school with rally-goers and cameras, the gap between "non-violent" and catastrophe narrows fast.
The district's response was a masterclass in institutional cowardice. An LAUSD spokesperson told Just the News that UTLA "is a separate legal entity" and that questions about "its trainings or internal activities should be directed to UTLA."
That might be technically accurate. It is also absurd. UTLA's entire plan depends on LAUSD infrastructure — the buildings, the security cameras, the professional development time, the service learning credit system. The district published its own February 2025 "reference guide" on "Campuses as Safe Zones and Resource Centers," which UTLA's presentation directly references. The memorandum of understanding designating school grounds as sanctuary spaces has LAUSD's signature on it.
When asked whether UTLA's commandeering of taxpayer-funded resources for ICE resistance would violate any law, regulation, or policy, and whether LAUSD would have legal recourse against the union, the spokesperson said the district "had nothing to add."
Nothing to add. A union is planning to lock down your schools, mobilize children against federal agents, and use your cameras and your budget to do it — and the district has nothing to add.
LAUSD did offer one statement of substance: the district expects employees to follow "applicable laws and District policies … during the workday and in their interactions with students." Whether that expectation extends to union-organized resistance operations conducted on district property with district resources during the school day remains, apparently, a question too uncomfortable to answer.
UTLA's scheme doesn't exist in isolation. It reflects a growing trend of institutions — universities, unions, municipal governments — converting their public mandate into political resistance infrastructure.
At the University of Maine, Customs and Border Protection was removed as a participating employer from the Career Center's February 11 career fair after boycott demands from the Graduate Workers Union and other student groups on January 28. At Arizona State University, ICE backed out of a January 22 career fair for law students following a threatened protest and petition.
The pattern is consistent: public institutions funded by all taxpayers are systematically excluding federal law enforcement agencies from the spaces those taxpayers fund. The mechanism varies — boycotts, petitions, union pressure, administrative capitulation — but the result is the same. Federal agencies tasked with enforcing duly enacted immigration law are treated as pariahs in the very institutions that depend on federal funding to exist.
The Supreme Court's landmark ruling overturning a 41-year-old precedent that allowed public sector unions to compel non-members to pay agency fees — on the grounds that such arrangements violate the First Amendment right against compelled speech — was supposed to curb this kind of overreach. It limited the financial leverage unions could exert over dissenting workers. But UTLA's planning documents suggest the union simply shifted tactics. You don't need compelled dues when you can commandeer an entire school district's resources through a memorandum of understanding and a compliant administration.
Strip away the euphemisms and the acronyms, and what Defending Education uncovered is straightforward: a public employee union planned to use public schools as shields against federal law, recruit children as participants in that resistance, reward their participation with academic credit, and brand lawful immigration enforcement as kidnapping.
Every element of this plan subordinates the educational mission of LAUSD to the political agenda of UTLA. Every dollar spent on bullhorns and banner machines is a dollar not spent on classrooms. Every hour of professional development redirected toward "immigration enforcement safety reviews" is an hour not spent on teaching. Every student handed a megaphone and told to confront ICE agents is a student whose school failed its most basic duty — to keep them safe and educated, not radicalized and exposed.
Los Angeles parents send their children to school to learn. UTLA wants to send them to the barricades.
