Immigration agents used racial slurs during inspections in Los Angeles

from Sergio Olmos and Wendy FryCalMatters

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Federal immigration agents used racial slurs, including “wet” and “thin” to identify people to target as they drove through Los Angeles last year, according to text messages cited in a new court filing asking a federal judge there to bar agents from racial profiling.

Plaintiffs in Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem filed for a preliminary injunction Monday, alleging that agents conducted a “sustained campaign of suspicionless and discriminatory detention” in the Central District of California even after noisy street assaults as of summer 2025 it was discontinued. As one ICE agent admitted in testimony, “We’re (still) doing the same thing (as ‘Operation at Large’) just with a different name.”

The filing included months of discovery evidence, including body camera footage and testimony from agents, ordered by U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong after the U.S. Supreme Court stayed an earlier temporary restraining order in the case last September.

Attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union, a coalition of advocacy organizations and private attorneys, said in court filings that the new evidence undermines the government’s argument before the Supreme Court that agents relied on specific intelligence on individuals instead of race when deciding who to stop.

According to court documents in dashcam footage, a Border Patrol agent at the Hollywood Home Depot said, “There was a guy, I’m pretty sure he was wet, he was just sitting in this minivan.”

In one text message quoted in the filing, an agent said: “Yeah, just plug us in wherever you see some tones and we’ll pop out.” In another message, an agent described seeing “tanks everywhere selling food.”

“Tonks” is a derogatory term used by Border Patrol agents, it is reported derived from sound a a heavy object such as a flashlight does on the skull of a migrant. In 2019, US Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency for the Border Patrol, issued guidance specifically stating that “the term ‘ton’ is not appropriate” because of its pejorative connotations, according to emails and text messages revealed to HuffPost under the Freedom of Information Act.

In one deposition, an immigration agent bluntly says that the suspicious-looking person they’re looking for is an “older Hispanic.” In their filing, the plaintiffs’ attorneys argued that immigration agents engaged in illegal practices by failing to develop a “pre-stop individualized, itemized reasonable suspicion assessment” of targets and instead using racial profiling to detain anyone they believed to be low-income and Hispanic. Such actions swept away US citizens and violated the Constitution’s prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure.

The court filing, released Monday, revealed a May 2025 directive from Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters that told field officers to “turn the creativity dial up to 11” and arrest more “collateral.” This is the agency’s term for people who are not the original target of the operation but who are encountered in the process.

ACLU attorneys said the agents’ practices, including racial profiling of Hispanics, were justified and directed from the top.

“This was not a fraudulent method of operating agency orders; it was exactly what agency leadership desired,” the filing states.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs said ICE has doubled the ranks of its field teams, “thanks in part to recruitment ads using white nationalist messages.” The filing says some claimants and members of organizations, including those who are US citizens, have already been stopped more than once.

Although the filing relies on communications from the agents’ cellphones, most of the agents involved in the Los Angeles raids have not yet turned in their devices.

Last month, in a contested hearing, Frimpong weighed whether to hold the federal government in contempt for failing to comply with a court order to turn over the agents’ cellphones.

The government said in court that of the 1,400 Border Patrol agents involved in operations in Los Angeles last year, more than half reported using their personal cellphones.

The federal government said it had asked agents to upload all their personal phone data to a government repository, a compromise worked out with his union designed to limit any workplace grievances. But only 88 agents volunteered to hand over their phones for forensic imaging, and none of them have yet been caught.

The plaintiffs argue that the government deserves sanctions by “directly saying they will not comply with an order because their employees may complain if they do.”

Progress on public telephones is no faster. In court, attorneys for the federal government revealed that they only shot 3 government phones every 2 weeks, not knowing the exact number of government phones but estimating about “200-300 still to come.” That’s a rate that will take the government nearly four years to comply with the court’s order.

“There is enough to suggest that this is a system-wide practice of identifying people by racial slurs,” said Myra Joachin, an attorney with the ACLU.

CalMatters has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.