Despite Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids becoming more common in Long Beach and surrounding cities, Long Beach City College’s training for active ICE raids on campus has been inadequate, amounting to two optional training webinars and an emailed power point that should’ve been mandatory for the college.
LBCC’s faculty, staff and administration were trained differently based on their positions at the institution, but professors are the main employees that come into contact with students every day.
For a school that takes pride in being outspoken about supporting their undocumented immigrant students and being a Hispanic serving institution, many employees did not receive in-person training on how to respond in the event of an ICE raid.
The current procedure, described on a flyer in rooms like the English as a Second Language (ESL) office at the TTC campus, is that if immigration agents were to show up on campus, put the student in a non-public area like behind a counter or a locked faculty office; tell the ICE agent that they are not allowed into the area; contact the school’s point of contact through email, Vice President Alisia Kirkwood for the TTC campus and President Mike Munoz for LAC; then call campus police to come and verify the warrant.
Email is considered the official form of communication at the school, but realistically if an ICE agent is present, email communication wouldn’t work because many people either don’t read them in time or the email takes too long to get to the recipient.
The ESL department at the TTC campus had an in-person reminder walkthrough training at the beginning of the fall semester by Kirkwood because the department was considered “more impacted.”
There are no specific statistics for LBCC’s undocumented demographic, but according to the Higher Ed Immigration Portal, 10% of students in California are undocumented immigrants.
Most of the time, professors do not know which of their students are undocumented immigrants, unless the student tells the professor themselves, so the school needs to train all departments through a detailed in-person training and walkthrough.
LBCC offered three campus wide faculty and staff days in 2025, College Day in August, which was mandatory for full-time faculty, and Flex Day in March and September, where they should have offered an in-person training on immigration procedures.
Both optional webinars took place in the spring semester with one being open to students explaining “limited zones,” which are non-public areas like locked faculty offices and a designated computer lab, and another general training in March at the Spring 2025 Flex Day, when immigration raids were still an issue, but the fears of immigration raids ramped up drastically in June.
Though the school cannot make training mandatory for professors because of contractual limitations, anything mandatory must be negotiated, with the next possible date to do so being April 22 for the first Flex Day of 2026.
Offering an in-person opportunity on this Flex Day would be more effective than previous Zoom webinars, as it would be a more involved training process than an online meeting.
Front desk workers in the areas meant for student assistance like financial aid, admissions and records and the multidisciplinary success center are mainly student workers and did not get any training past the instruction to “get your supervisor.”
Student workers are not supposed to engage with agents, but as a front desk person, they are most likely going to be the first point of contact with them.
Even then, the only resources that the student workers and staff in these areas were given are red “Know Your Rights” cards for students or employees who may not know what their constitutional rights are for the situation.
As a public institution, LBCC cannot legally do much other than educate students and employees on basic constitutional rights and securing undocumented students in a locked private space, but implementing conferences on immigration protocols at future mandatory events and doing more than just an email is vital.
