Coverage spread: 2 sources — 1 left · 1 international
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What the documents show
Newly released court filings allege that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents deployed to the Los Angeles area last summer used racial slurs while discussing immigration enforcement operations. According to the Guardian, text messages exchanged among agents included the term “tonks,” an anti-immigrant slur that US Border Patrol has previously cautioned against using, and the word “wet,” a shortened form of a long-standing slur directed at undocumented Mexicans who cross the Rio Grande into the United States. One message, sent on 4 July 2025, referenced “tonks” selling food at Fourth of July festivities in Long Beach. Another, from 2 July 2025, mocked people for posting on social media that they were “wet,” suggesting agents were monitoring social media to identify targets. Both terms reportedly recurred throughout other internal communications.
The lawsuit and allegations of racial profiling
The communications were made public on a Monday court filing tied to a lawsuit brought in June 2025 by five men against the Trump administration, challenging ICE’s stop-and-arrest tactics during the Los Angeles raids as unlawful. Attorneys for the plaintiffs are asking a federal judge to prohibit further detentions based on race or socioeconomic status. Three of the plaintiffs were detained while waiting at a bus stop for a ride to work, and a fourth said he was grabbed by the arm and pushed against a gate by masked agents even after telling them he was a US citizen.
Mayra Joachin, deputy director of immigrants’ rights at the ACLU of Southern California, said the records reveal “a pattern of racial profiling,” adding that immigration officers are violating the law by detaining people without cause and largely based on skin color. A separate declaration cited in the filing came from Angel Santiago Tafolla, an Anaheim resident and US citizen not among the plaintiffs, who said ICE agents raided a car wash in Orange County where he worked. He was handcuffed and placed in a van before agents realized he was a citizen. Tafolla said lighter-skinned coworkers who also fled were not chased, and that he believed he was pursued because he is a darker-skinned Latino.
A December deposition from an ICE officer who oversaw the bus-stop operation reportedly indicated that individuals loitering in search of day labor were flagged as potentially undocumented, describing them generically as “older Hispanic males” — testimony the plaintiffs’ lawyers point to as further evidence that profiling by appearance, rather than individualized suspicion, drove the stops.
Broader context: national guard deployment and protests
The Guardian situates the slurs controversy within the wider fallout from last summer’s Los Angeles ICE raids, which drew sharp criticism from city and state officials. Tensions escalated further after President Trump deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles, saying the move was necessary to “liberate” the city from what he called a “migrant invasion.” The deployment helped trigger protests against ICE’s presence in the region. The article notes that ICE, in response to earlier criticism, has said its agents are focused on enforcement rather than “entertaining performative outrage,” though the text cuts off before elaborating further on the agency’s response to the slur allegations specifically.
How the coverage compares
The Guardian’s report is the most substantive account among the sources reviewed, providing direct quotations from the leaked text messages, details of the plaintiffs’ individual encounters with agents, and statements from the ACLU’s Joachin and from Tafolla. It frames the story primarily around the lawsuit’s legal argument that ICE engaged in racial profiling, using the slur-laden communications as evidence supporting that claim.
Al Jazeera’s item, listed only as a video newsfeed post about a “Guatemala couple” and ICE, appears to relate to a separate but connected story about immigration enforcement affecting a Guatemalan couple, though no article text was available to detail its specific content, so it cannot be directly compared to the Guardian’s reporting on the slur allegations. This gap illustrates that broader coverage of ICE’s Los Angeles-era enforcement practices spans multiple angles — from internal agent conduct to the human impact on specific immigrant families — without full overlap in the material reviewed here.
Why it matters
The disclosures add to a growing body of evidence cited in litigation challenging ICE’s enforcement tactics under the Trump administration, particularly claims that agents targeted individuals based on race, ethnicity, or perceived socioeconomic status rather than specific evidence of immigration violations. The case could set precedent for limits on stop-and-arrest practices nationally if the plaintiffs succeed in obtaining a court order barring race-based detentions. The episode also underscores ongoing friction between federal immigration authorities and local communities in Los Angeles, a flashpoint that already prompted a National Guard deployment and sustained public protest.
Sources
Featured photo: Paul Goyette from Chicago, USA via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)