The Brief

This story was originally published by The LA Local on Feb. 25, 2026.

As federal immigration enforcement raids continue across Los Angeles, a broader demographic of people is stepping up to volunteer their time to monitor and document immigration raids in their neighborhoods, according to Ron Gochez, organizer with the rapid‑response network Unión del Barrio.

“We have senior citizen retirees showing up saying, ‘I’m an old white woman — how can I help?’ We have students from community colleges and universities. We have people who look like longtime activists and people who look like they’ve never done this before,” he said. “It’s solidarity being shown by Angelenos of all shapes, sizes, colors and ages.”

While longtime Latino organizers have led the patrols, their numbers are growing thanks to the new volunteers who aren’t necessarily Latino.

Unión del Barrio has outgrown their usual meeting space at the United Teachers union building in Koreatown, which used to draw a few dozen people.

Along with their patrols, the group supports families impacted by immigration raids and issues real-time alerts over social media.

In late January, the day after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, about 400 people showed up for a training session, Unión del Barrio organizer Ron Gochez said.

“The very next day, we had 1,000 people on a Zoom training for educators — and we couldn’t have more because the Zoom limit was 1,000,” Gochez said.

Organizers in Pasadena expected a few dozen volunteers at All Saints Episcopal Church and were surprised when nearly 800 showed up for the training session, according to Pasadena Now.

For the first time, the majority of volunteers at a recent training session were white, Gochez said.

“I think the administration and ICE thought that by killing Alex (Pretti), that people would be scared and intimidated and would stop participating,” he said.

Instead, it has had the opposite effect.

Other immigrant advocacy groups say they’re seeing a similar surge in support. Representatives at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) and the Immigrant Defenders Law Center report a spike in volunteers, donations, and attendance at “Know Your Rights” workshops.

The legal advocacy group says they’re going to continue sustaining deportation defense, managed information hotlines, and expect that engagement to remain strong as federal immigration enforcement intensifies.

Ron Gochez, a member of Unión del Barrio, speaks to volunteers in South Los Angeles in February 2025.

(

Andrew Lopez

/

Boyle Heights Beat

)

Residents living near Koreatown and Pico Union have seen a sharp increase in immigration raids in recent months. Unión del Barrio volunteer, Oscar, who provided only his first name out of concerns over retaliation from the federal government, has seen firsthand the effects of the raids.

“This part of Los Angeles — Pico Union, K-town, MacArthur Park, Westlake — has been hit incredibly hard throughout the last year,” Oscar said, pointing to raids along the El Salvador Community Corridor in Pico Union. “They’ve gone up and down Pico multiple times.”

Westlake, a dense immigrant neighborhood predominantly made up of renters and noncitizen workers, has also been identified as one of the most vulnerable areas in L.A. to ICE raids, according to a county-sponsored study.

Oscar leads patrol training sessions, but before joining Union del Barrio, he patrolled his neighborhood with a friend to report on immigration enforcement. “It just didn’t feel like enough,” he said. “I wanted to be part of a space of dedicated organizers.”

Overall, he’s seen more people working together across racial and gender lines, with a common goal of protecting their communities, helping deliver groceries to impacted famlies, monitor their neighborhoods and feel like they have something to do in the face of the ongoing immigration raids.

Immigration agents detain a man selling flowers in Boyle Heights on Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026.

(

Courtesy of Verita Topete

/

Centro CSO

)

“People are coming in angry, determined,” he said. “but ultimately I think people feel empowered during the training.”

Unión del Barrio has expanded beyond its usual territory in South Los Angeles and the group now patrols in Boyle Heights, Long Beach, the San Fernando Valley, Beverly Hills and Brentwood, Gochez said.

“We have eyes and ears everywhere,” Gochez said. “I’m very comfortable saying there are thousands of people patrolling in the greater L.A. area.”

Although the group rarely solicits donations, Gochez said they have seen an uptick in funding, which helps cover costs from patrolling and printing “Know Your Rights” flyers and other materials.

Despite the heightened attention, Unión del Barrio has not altered its training curriculum, making sure that volunteers are following the law, but also aware that their safety is not guaranteed when they head out to monitor the immigration raids.

Organizers strongly discourage undocumented individuals or those on probation or parole from participating in community patrols, instead encouraging them to contribute in other ways.

“We’re not trying to become martyrs,” Gochez said. “We don’t want to be arrested, beaten or killed. But there is risk involved.”

The L.A. City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to make permanent a city pilot program that diverts police away from some mental health crisis calls.

Since launching in 2024, clinicians with the city’s Unarmed Model of Crisis Response have handled more than 17,000 calls for service, ranging from mental health crises to wellbeing checks. According to city reports, about 96% of those calls were resolved without police.

“We can’t keep deploying armed officers to handle mental health crisis calls because the outcome is Angelenos paying with loss of life and millions of their tax dollars for legal settlements,” Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who co-authored the motion to enshrine the program, said at Tuesday’s meeting.

According to Hernandez, in 2023, more than a third of LAPD shootings involved someone experiencing a mental health crisis.

Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson said the data from city reports was "incontrovertible and unassailable," showing the program’s success at diverting police and fire first responders away from mental health crisis situations.

Council members said the move to make the unarmed model permanent was also a matter of fiscal responsibility. According to a news release from the offices of Hernandez and Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, on average it costs the city roughly $85 per hour to dispatch LAPD officers, while a response from a UMCR team costs roughly $35 per hour.

Last fall, progressive policy advocacy group LA Forward, convened a summit of local and state officials with the goal of making UMCR permanent and expanding it.

Godfrey Plata, deputy director of LA Forward, told LAist his group was “incredibly excited” to see the city make the pilot program permanent.

Plata said he sees enshrining the program as a first step in expanding the program citywide, which his group hopes to do by the 2028 Olympics.

How the program works

In 2024, the city partnered with three nonprofit organizations — Exodus Recovery, Alcott Center and Penny Lane Centers — to provide teams of trained clinicians in service areas spread across L.A. The teams are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week within the Police Department’s Devonshire, Wilshire, Southeast, West LA, Olympic and West Valley divisions.

Crisis response workers are trained in de-escalation techniques, mental health, substance use, conflict resolution and more, according to a report on the program from the Office of City Administrative Officer. The teams don’t have the authority to order psychiatric holds for people in crisis, but they can work with them to find help locally, and spend more time on follow up than law enforcement can.

In its first year, Los Angeles’s Unarmed Model of Crisis Response sent teams of unarmed clinicians to  more than 6,700 calls for service, ranging from mental health crises to wellbeing checks. Only about 4% were redirected to the LAPD. Average response times have been under 30 minutes.

Examples of these interactions include members of the teams taking food to a woman who was crying and hungry, working with a business owner to engage with someone sleeping in a parking lot and sitting with a family for nearly three hours to help resolve a conflict involving a relative.

What’s next

The motion approved Tuesday also directs city officials to form a working group made up of the LAPD, the L.A. Fire Department and other agencies to address inefficiencies in the dispatch system. The goal of the working group will be to centralize unarmed crisis response dispatch and improve response times.

On a Friday afternoon on a quiet suburban block in Lakewood, the only sign that something special is happening is a small handwritten chalkboard with a small Peruvian flag and an American flag placed nearby, listing the day's specials — Papa Rellena, Aji de Pollo, Lomo Saltado. This is Lomo Fuego, a fully licensed Peruvian restaurant operating out of a family home, and it's part of a quietly growing movement reshaping how Los Angeles defines a restaurant.

The only sign you'll find outside Lomo Fuego — a handwritten chalkboard on a quiet Lakewood lawn

(

Gab Chabrán

/

LAist

)

Since launching in January 2019, L.A. County's Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operation (MEHKO) program has issued more than 200 permits, transforming residential kitchens into licensed restaurants.

Lomo Fuego's founder is Heidi Randolph, a Peruvian immigrant and former interior designer who left her career to be closer to home. With a new mortgage and no income, she found an unlikely business partner in her brother — a trained chef who had just arrived from Peru — and an idea: turn the backyard into a restaurant. Her husband, William Armando Rios, a truck driver, had his doubts, but Randolph pushed forward anyway.

Randolph wanted to do things right, so she called the city of Lakewood. They told her it was impossible. She kept researching anyway and eventually found MEHKO.

What Is MEHKO?

MEHKO — short for Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operation — is a program administered by the L.A. County Department of Public Health that allows residents to run licensed food businesses from their primary residences. No commercial kitchen required, no landlord to answer to. Operators are capped at 30 meals a day and $100,000 in gross annual revenue — guardrails designed to keep the businesses appropriately scaled to a residential setting, but also the kind that make brick-and-mortar the natural next step for a thriving operation.

The permit process, she says, was surprisingly accessible.

Her total startup investment came in under $2,000 — a fraction of the $30,000 to $40,000 it typically costs to open even a modest commercial kitchen.

"My savings from my previous job helped me, and my husband supported me in everything — in the beginning, he was like, what are you doing? But he believed in me."

Luis, Fritz, and Heidi Randolph — the family behind Lomo Fuego in Lakewood.

(

Gab Chabrán

/

LAist

)

Finding their footing

Starting a restaurant is never easy, especially when it’s in your backyard.

Randolph said the early days were filled with uncertainty, when she'd find herself cooking only to have nobody come, leftovers piling up, credit cards creeping toward their limits, social media posts going largely unnoticed. She pushed through anyway.

Luis, Heidi Randolph's brother and head chef, along with their mother Fritz, preps for service in the Lomo Fuego kitchen

(

Gab Chabrán

/

LAist

)

"You just have to be patient — posting on Facebook Marketplace, Instagram, TikTok. Little by little, it started getting somewhere," she said.

The turning point came from an unexpected source. Cook Alliance, a nonprofit that works alongside the county to support MEHKO operators, reached out and offered to connect Randolph with an influencer. The creator, from the account LA OC Eats, came out and shot a video.

Overnight, everything changed.

"It was a line of people outside — way outside," she said.

Neighbors, to Randolph's relief, couldn't have been more supportive.

Behind the scenes, it's a true family affair — Randolph's brother handles the bulk of the cooking while her mother, Fritz, who still works as a housekeeper at the VA on her days off, pitches in wherever she's needed. The family has since brought on additional kitchen and waitstaff to keep up with demand. It's exactly the kind of scene Randolph had always envisioned.

The Jungle, the Germans and Aji amarillo

To understand Lomo Fuego’s menu, you have to understand where Heidi Randolph comes from.

Randolph grew up in Oxapampa, a small town in Peru's high jungle — tucked into the Pasco region about five hours east of Lima, where the Andes begin their descent toward the Amazon — founded by German and Austrian immigrants in the mid-1800s. It helps explain why the menu at Lomo Fuego includes schnitzel and a plantain-based strudel alongside the lomo saltado.

Lomo Saltado Pobre at Lomo Fuego — the dish that started it all, served with rice, fries, fried plantains, and a fried egg.

(

Gab Chabrán

/

LAist

)

Peruvian cuisine has long absorbed outside influences — Chinese laborers brought the wok and soy sauce that make lomo saltado possible, and the stir-fried noodle dish Tallarín Saltado is essentially Peru's answer to lo mein, so deeply rooted in Chinese cooking it belongs to its own culinary tradition known as Chifa.

Being the ever-curious food writer that I am, I passed on many of the well-known dishes and went straight for the daily specials, landing on the Aji de Gallina — a stewed chicken dish built around ají amarillo, the foundational "soul" of Peruvian cuisine. Alongside garlic and red onion, it forms what many cooks consider the holy trinity of Peruvian cooking. The pepper itself is deceptively complex — fruity, vibrant, and slightly sweet, with tropical notes and a moderate heat that never overwhelms. In Randolph's version, it announces itself immediately through its creamy textures, highlighted by the savoriness of the stewed chicken with chunks of boiled potatoes and white rice.

Seco de Res con Frijoles at Lomo Fuego — tender beef braised in chicha de jora and cilantro, served with canario beans and white rice.

(

Gab Chabrán

/

LAist

)

I also tried the Seco de Res con Frijoles, which tells a different story — tender beef braised in chicha de jora, an ancient Andean corn beer once consumed ceremonially during Inca religious festivals. With a sauce built on cilantro and ají amarillo, it’s served over white rice and canario beans, a Peruvian staple prized for its creamy, buttery texture. It's a dish that wears its history openly, with Spanish, African, and Indigenous traditions folded into every bite.

Pull up a chair

One of the things I noticed about dining at Lomo Fuego was its intimacy — eating in someone's backyard has a way of softening people. I arrived right when they opened, and soon thereafter, families of all ages stopped by, along with coworkers grabbing lunch and a neighbor checking in on an upcoming catering order.

Aji de Gallina at Lomo Fuego — shredded chicken in a creamy aji amarillo sauce, topped with a hard boiled egg

(

Gab Chabrán

/

LAist

)

"Seeing the people excited when they have that first bite — that's what motivates me every day," she said.

Outgrowing the Backyard

Lomo Fuego has grown beyond what Randolph ever imagined when she was cooking in a void in those early days. She's now pursuing a loan and scouting locations for a brick-and-mortar restaurant — the natural next step for a MEHKO kitchen that has outgrown its backyard. But she's clear about what she's taking with her.

"I hope in the future people can say, this still tastes like food from home."

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. The FBI told our media partner CBS LA that the the underlying affidavit remained under court-ordered seal.

What LAUSD has said

LAUSD published a statement online saying the district was aware of "law enforcement activity" at its headquarters and the superintendent's home.

"The district is cooperating with the investigation, and we do not have further information at this time," the district said.

The scene at search locations

Neighbors told LAist they first noticed officers at Carvalho's home around 6 a.m. One of them, John, said an officer told him to stay in his home. LAist agreed not to publish his last name out of fear of reprisal.

At LAUSD's downtown headquarters, multiple district staff members told LAist they were unaware of the raids until they saw the media gathered outside.

Carvalho has been superintendent of LAUSD since 2022, and the board renewed his contract in 2025.

Prior to coming to L.A., Carvalho had worked for the Miami-Dade County school district for decades, 30 years as a teacher and the last 14 years as the district's supervisor. WLRN, the NPR station in Miami, reported Wednesday that the local FBI searched a residence in Southwest Ranches, a town west of Ft. Lauderdale, "as part of this matter and have since cleared the scene." James Marshall, spokesperson from the FBI in Miami, did not provide additional information in an email to WLRN.

What we know so far

It remained unclear Wednesday afternoon what the cause of the investigation was or if it is in any way related to previous issues between the district and the Trump administration or the superintendent's time previous to LAUSD.

Carvalho and the district’s elected board have expressed unanimous support for immigrant students, staff and families since President Donald Trump was elected to a second term. The superintendent also has spoken openly about his own journey as a former undocumented immigrant.

The district's first major conflict with the administration began in February 2025, when agents from the Department of Homeland Security attempted to enter multiple LAUSD schools but were rebuffed. The DOJ also recently petitioned to join a lawsuit alleging the district discriminates against white students.

Carvalho's time at LAUSD has included a number of wins for the district, including gains in test scores and participation in AP classes.

But it's also had rocky moments, including the failed 2024 rollout of an AI chatbot, Ed, which was designed to be a "personal assistant" to students that would point them toward mental health resources and nudge students who were falling behind.

Within three months of its debut, the company behind Ed, 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.