Immigration agents used racial slurs against Latinos in messages, video obtained by ACLU

Immigration agents who arrived in Los Angeles last summer targeted Latinos using slurs like “tonk” and “wet,” according to body camera footage and court filings asking a federal judge to bar agents from stopping them based on racial profiling.

After the June attack at the Home Depot in Hollywood, body camera footage captured an agent saying: “There was a guy, I’m sure he was soaking wet sitting in that minivan.” A text thread revealed the agent talking about “everywhere tones selling food” — using a term reportedly based on the sound of an agent’s flashlight hitting a migrant’s head. In the video, the agent said, “Yeah, just plug us in wherever you see the donkeys and we’ll get out.”

Body camera images and documents obtained by law, which provide a window into the thoughts of the agents who attacked the entire area of ​​LA, were described in a preliminary ruling filed on Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Public Counsel, and other groups and private lawyers who want to stop “the ongoing campaign of impunity and discrimination”.

Mayra Joachín, an attorney for the ACLU of Southern California, said that language advocates insist that “the root cause of the immigration process is a sense of racism.”

“What we have seen is just a fraction of what information might be there, because not all government records from phones have been changed,” said Joachín. “It is also possible that there are many other phone records that have not been answered and could be very dangerous evidence for this organization.”

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The evidence, which concerns both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents, was turned into immediate discovery ordered by US District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong after the Supreme Court reversed its previous order barring stops based solely on race or nationality, language, location or employment, either alone or in combination.

The plaintiffs in the case, who filed their lawsuit in June 2025, said the discovery “totally contradicts” the representations made by the government where they want to stay.

The evidence shows that “race is a major factor driving the stops of defendants, and that ongoing stops of defendants — including US citizens — are neither brief nor disruptive,” the motion said.

The plaintiffs asked Frimpong to bar agents from “relying on a person who is presumed to be Latino to conduct traffic stops, regardless of a known description.”

“This is the latest attempt by the plaintiffs to ensure that there is transparency in how immigration enforcement is carried out and the accountability of officials involved in these activities,” said Joachín. “There are safeguards in place that immigration agents have to do any job and what we see from the evidence is that they are very much driven by racism.”

Change under Trump

For years, including during Trump’s first term, ICE compiled a target list that would include the daily routines of people it wanted to detain. Those activities focus on individual investigations of specific individuals.

That changed last year, attorneys said in the motion, citing an email from ICE headquarters in late May 2025 instructing field offices to begin arresting “collaterals,” or non-targets, in bulk. Soon after, the plaintiffs say, agents “began a coordinated campaign of stop-and-frisk based on people’s information.”

“These operations are very different from the operations that took place before, where the immigration agents were investigating and making plausible facts in order to have reasonable suspicions in the person that they should stop,” said Joachín. “Now that’s not what’s happening, it’s racism that is pervasive and underpins the way this organization works.”

Advocates suspect that one of the ways the government uses the “racial profiling policy” is through speeding, where they drive around without looking for a specific target. In text chains detailing the movement, agents discussed “soft calculations” of “probability” based on location calls and “navigation.”

After Frimpong issued a temporary restraining order last year, the government “represented to this Court and the Supreme Court that these operations were based on ‘espionage,'” the motion said.

“But discovery revealed that the defendants’ minor ‘espionage’ was conducted to warrant operations in areas accessible to the public. The defendants already had the intent to raid,” according to the motion. Lawyers cited a concession from a veteran ICE agent who was assigned to participate in the operation and said they were not “honestly designed” to arrest the targets.

According to the proposal, the government sent intelligence teams to Home Depot and car washes where they “investigated until they found a certain number—a small number—of people who may have been illegally present.”

“The defendants then chose a date to raid the property, without considering whether the previously identified ‘targets’ were present,” the motion said. Surprisingly, Defendants generally did not arrest their ‘targets,’ as they did many others.”

The lawyers referred to the arrested agent saying “[G]go out and start arresting people” just before detaining a lawful legal citizen.

The government argued that ICE was trying to find a target when it approached the three men, the lead plaintiffs in the case, at a bus stop in Pasadena, according to the petition. Plaintiffs argue that the goal that day “was always to tie up ‘collaterals.'” In a series of texts cited in the motion, the lead officer that day told a colleague to “bring more cuffs.”

When that manager was asked later to testify about the appearance of the people they were looking for, he replied “[o]old Hispanic,” according to the motion.

“In short, the record clearly establishes that the Defendants are indeed looking for Latinos,” the attorneys said.

Text messages and pictures

The proposal contains several references to immigration agents using racial slurs such as the slur “tonk.” Guidance from US Customs and Border Protection in 2019 said “the word tonk is inappropriate” because “it is considered a derogatory term and CBP does not condone its use,” the Huffington Post reported.

In one text series, the agent referred to “snapping and grabbing.”

“I think [the Border Patrol agents] know only one way to work,” the agent said in a series of texts. “See bodies, chase bodies.”

It is not clear if the agents sent other abusive messages, as many phone calls have yet to be answered.

At a hearing last month, Frimpong weighed whether to hold the government accountable for not complying with a court order that required them to legally capture any cell phone used by an agent on any of the 15 identified jobs.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice told Frimpong that no phone calls were taken at the time, although more than 800 officials have testified that they used their phones while on duty.