Misinformation Leads to Confusion in Fresno's Immigrant Communities

Here are the morning’s top stories on Thursday, Feb. 26, 2026

• In light of violent immigration enforcement in major cities like Chicago, LA and Minneapolis, immigrants around the country are wondering: could this happen in my community? In the Central Valley, waiting for an answer to that question has given way to fear and misinformation.
• The LA Unified School Board is meeting behind closed doors Thursday where they’re expected to discuss the status of Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. This comes a day after federal investigators raided his home and office at the district’s headquarters.
• An agent who is reportedly with the Department of Homeland Security is set to appear in court in Riverside Friday. He was charged with assault with a deadly weapon among other felonies. But holding him accountable might be difficult.

In the absence of major ICE operations in Fresno, fear and misinformation have taken their place

On a Friday night in late January, around 100 members of Fresno’s Southeast Asian community gathered in a banquet hall. They were there to discuss immigration concerns in light of aggressive and at-times-violent immigration enforcement recently carried out in Minneapolis and other cities.

“We had representatives from our Khmer community, our Lao community, our Mien community, and our Hmong community,” said May Gnia Her, who was in the front row of the gathering at The Fresno Center, a non-profit organization that serves members of Southeast Asian and other diaspora in the Fresno area. Her is the executive director of a different non-profit: Stone Soup Fresno, which runs a preschool and other services for both kids and adults.

Her is Hmong – an indigenous ethnic group from Southeast Asia and China – and she explains that the Hmong-American story is unique. Many Hmong people fled to the U.S. as refugees beginning in the 1970s. During the Vietnam War, countless Hmong people had risked their lives fighting alongside the U.S. in a parallel “Secret War” in neighboring Laos. As a result, tens of thousands of Hmong people died, and hundreds of thousands were no longer welcome in their communities. “We were left with no homeland,” Her said. “We were left with no villages, no place to go back.” Today, decades later, many who came to the U.S. as refugees have become naturalized U.S. citizens, and younger generations of Hmong-Americans who were born here were granted birthright citizenship.

Still, many say they’re afraid of being detained and even deported under a federal immigration crackdown by the second Trump administration. Local law enforcement agencies don’t have solid answers for the community, either. When asked whether federal immigration officials have ramped up their presence in the Valley, representatives of the Fresno Police Department and the Fresno and Madera County sheriff’s offices couldn’t say – though they did all confirm they don’t cooperate directly with ICE.

In the absence of information about whether the landscape is changing, some locals have taken it upon themselves to be immigration vigilantes, flooding social media with photos and videos purporting to show ICE agents in the community. And although a few of these videos likely did capture ICE agents, many were other local law enforcement operations. For instance, the Merced County Sheriff’s Office in mid-January confirmed that a set of videos claiming to shed light on ICE operations in fact captured a massive law enforcement operation being carried out by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and a handful of other law enforcement agencies. Misinformation in times like these can backfire, said Gregorio Matiaz, an immigration program manager with the non-profit Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño that provides services to the local indigenous Mexican community. “It’s causing more uncertainty and fear amongst the community,” he said.

FBI raids LAUSD superintendent’s home and office

Federal agents searched Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters and the San Pedro home of Superintendent Alberto Carvalho on Wednesday morning, the Department of Justice confirmed.

The reason for the searches is unknown. A DOJ spokesperson said the agency has a court-authorized warrant but declined to provide additional details.  A home in Broward County was also searched as part of an investigation related to Carvalho, the FBI’s Miami office confirmed. Multiple media reports have found that the house is linked to Debra Kerr, a former consultant for the tech start-up AllHere. That company secured a contract with LA Unified to develop an AI chatbot for the district. It ultimately failed to deliver.

Within three months of its debut, AllHere, furloughed the bulk of its staff; its CEO was later charged with fraud. The district defended the process it used to debut that chatbot, which cost $3 million.

The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education is scheduled to meet behind closed doors on Thursday to discuss the future of Superintendent Carvalho in the wake of the FBI raids.

Riverside County case highlights accountability for federal immigration agents

This story, originally published by KVCR, contains language that may be inappropriate for young or sensitive readers.

Riverside County prosecutors charged a man claiming to be a federal immigration officer with assault after he pulled a gun on a 17-year-old last November.

Gerardo Rodriguez, 46, was arrested after the incident by Riverside County Sheriff’s deputies at his home near Temecula’s wine country.

The case is moving through the courts as national scrutiny grows over how difficult it is to hold federal agents accountable. Experts claim legal actions in the last decade have curtailed people’s ability to sue, while the teenager’s attorney remains optimistic about holding Rodriguez accountable.

In-home surveillance video obtained by independent news outlet L.A. Taco shows Rodriguez walking in the middle of the block on Daybrook Terrace in Temecula, pointing his gun at an incoming pickup truck. “Stop, stop, slow down,” Rodriguez yells to the truck’s driver on video. “Freeze, police! Put the car in fucking park.” Deputies said Rodriguez wore a badge around his neck and identified himself as law enforcement. On video, Rodriguez is seen commanding the truck’s driver to get out of the car and sit on the curb.

The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department arrested Rodriguez at his home after investigators obtained a search warrant and collected evidence related to the incident. Rodriguez was arraigned in December, according to records obtained by KVCR, where he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon, child endangerment and false imprisonment. Rodriguez pleaded not guilty, and his private attorney, Michael Scaffidi, did not return calls requesting comment. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the case is still under investigation. The agency would not confirm or deny that Rodriguez was employed by the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees both ICE and Border Protection. ICE officials have told multiple media outlets that Rodriguez was not employed by their agency.

Kevin Johnson is the dean of the UC Davis School of Law, who considers Rodriguez’s situation an “extraordinary case.” “It’s really rare for a state prosecutor’s office or a county prosecutor’s office to bring these kinds of charges against a federal law enforcement officer,” Johnson said. “And I assume at some point, there’ll be efforts to dismiss it before there’s any plea.” Johnson, an expert on immigration law, said that state court cases involving federal agents are often moved to federal court to be resolved. He added that in many cases, the federal government attempts to intervene to defend its employees.