LA Times: Immigration Agents Used Racial Slurs Against Latinos in Videos and Texts

A set of body-camera videos and text messages, reported by the Los Angeles Times and other outlets, appears to show federal immigration agents using racial slurs to describe Latinos during last summer's immigration sweeps in Los Angeles. The material was submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union as part of a federal court filing that asks a judge to bar agents from making stops based on racial profiling. The revelations have drawn widespread anger, and they raise serious questions about how some of these operations were carried out.

According to the reporting, the records include agents using the term tonk, a slur that Customs and Border Protection itself formally called inappropriate in 2019 because of its derogatory origins, along with a separate slur aimed at undocumented immigrants. In one example, body-camera footage from a raid at a Home Depot reportedly captured an agent describing a man sitting in a minivan using that second slur. Text messages described people selling food ahead of Fourth of July festivities in Long Beach using the same dehumanizing language. The details are difficult to read precisely because they are aimed at ordinary people going about their day.

This is not just about hurt feelings over word choice. When the people entrusted with enforcement authority describe a community in slurs, it feeds directly into the concern at the heart of the lawsuit, that stops were being made based on how people looked rather than any actual evidence. Language shapes conduct. Referring to human beings as objects makes it easier to treat them as less than human, which is exactly why civil rights attorneys flagged the material rather than treating it as harmless venting between coworkers.

The weight of this falls on a community that is deeply woven into the region. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly half of Los Angeles County residents are Latino, the overwhelming majority of them U.S. citizens and longtime residents. So when agents use slurs while sweeping through neighborhoods, they are not talking about strangers in the abstract, they are talking about the families, workers, and vendors who make up the fabric of the city. That is a big part of why the reaction has been so intense.

The footage and messages are now part of ongoing litigation, and a judge will weigh whether the conduct supports the ACLU's request to restrict how these stops are made. Government agencies have broadly defended their enforcement operations and disputed claims of racial profiling in the past, and the case will play out in court rather than in comment sections. For now, the documented language speaks loudly on its own, and it has given the community fresh reason to demand accountability from the agencies involved.