F.B.I. Raids Home and Office of L.A.U.S.D. Chief Alberto Carvalho

The investigation appears to be related to a $6 million contract the district had with a tech start-up whose staff had ties to the superintendent, Alberto Carvalho.

F.B.I. agents raided the headquarters of the Los Angeles Unified School District and the home of its superintendent on Wednesday in an apparently widening investigation into a $6 million deal between the nation’s second-largest school system and a failed artificial intelligence start-up.

Federal officials said that the agency had executed a series of search warrants at the school district and at the home of the superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, but that the accompanying affidavits had been sealed by the court.

They did not elaborate on the target of the investigation. But a related F.B.I. search at a home in Florida appeared to link the Los Angeles raids to AllHere, a tech start-up that had secured a contract with the school district for an A.I. chatbot before the company filed for bankruptcy in 2024. The founder of AllHere was later charged with fraud.

Mr. Carvalho did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Debra Kerr, an education technology salesperson and with ties to both the superintendent and AllHere. Ms. Kerr owns the home in the Southwest Ranches, Fla., community that was searched, based on public records and an address provided by a federal official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly.

Los Angeles Unified said in a statement that it was aware of the activity at Mr. Carvalho’s home and the district’s headquarters and that it was cooperating with the federal authorities. The Los Angeles school district is home to about 400,000 students, and Mr. Carvalho, as superintendent, has one of the highest-profile jobs in K-12 education. He earns a salary of $440,000 a year.

The early morning raids occurred at the high-rise building near downtown Los Angeles that serves as the headquarters of the district and at Mr. Carvalho’s home in San Pedro, a coastal neighborhood near the Port of Los Angeles. The Trump administration has had contentious relations with officials in Los Angeles and California, and speculation over what prompted the raids was rampant for much of the day among local leaders, who scrambled to determine what had happened.

The office of Mayor Karen Bass, a nationally known Democrat who has been among the president’s frequent targets and is running for re-election this year, made it clear that the city government had no jurisdiction over the school system, in contrast to some other big cities. “L.A.U.S.D. is an independent body not governed by the City of Los Angeles,” a spokeswoman for the mayor said in a statement. “The Mayor’s Office has no information about this.”

There have been persistent questions about how the Los Angeles district has awarded contracts.

In 2023, the district agreed to pay AllHere to develop an A.I. chatbot for students and parents. Several former associates of Mr. Carvalho’s in Miami, including Ms. Kerr, were working for AllHere as consultants or employees.

Mr. Carvalho rolled out the chatbot, named Ed, at a glittery tech conference, promising that it could help parents keep on top of their children’s assignments and direct students to mental health support. But AllHere had little experience with this type of artificial intelligence, and the software was glitchy.

The company entered bankruptcy in 2024, and the federal government later charged its chief executive, Joanna Smith-Griffin, with wire fraud, securities fraud and aggravated identity theft. Ms. Smith-Griffin has pleaded not guilty to the indictment. Her case remains unresolved in federal court in New York.

Unionized teachers, who are currently embroiled in contract negotiations with the district and have authorized a strike if they don’t reach an agreement, have taken issue in particular with Los Angeles Unified’s spending on outside contracts for technology.

The district has also had ongoing tensions with the Trump administration over the past year.

The Justice Department last week joined a federal lawsuit alleging that a longstanding desegregation program at Los Angeles Unified discriminated against white students. The superintendent has also clashed with the federal authorities over immigration enforcement efforts at school sites in Los Angeles Unified.

Last year, after Homeland Security Investigations agents were turned away from two Los Angeles elementary schools where they said they were conducting welfare checks on undocumented students, Mr. Carvalho condemned their actions at a news conference that drew national attention.

Explaining his impassioned response, Mr. Carvalho, a native of Portugal, said that as a young man, he had been undocumented for a time in this country.

After high school, he had moved to New York, he said, and overstayed his visitor visa, working at restaurants, farms and construction sites and even falling into homelessness for a time. After about two years, he said, he secured a student visa and proper documentation and eventually went on to become a physics teacher and a U.S. citizen.

The federal raid on Mr. Carvalho’s home comes less than six months after the federal authorities arrested the Guyana-born superintendent of the Des Moines school system, Ian Roberts, amid charges that he was illegally living and working in the United States.

Mr. Carvalho came to Los Angeles in 2022 after 14 years of leading the public school system in Miami. Under his leadership, Los Angeles Unified demonstrated improvements in test scores and greater participation in Advanced Placement courses.

But his career has also been marked by high-profile missteps. In Miami, leaked emails suggested that he had an inappropriate relationship with a reporter covering education. In 2018, he accepted a job leading the nation’s largest school system, in New York City, but then abruptly backed out on live television.

Patricia Mazzei and Jill Cowan contributed reporting.

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