Please be aware that this report includes content some people may find offensive.
As federal immigration agents surged throughout the U.S. for “Operation at Large” during the summer of 2025, some officials in Southern California referred to potential detainees using language widely considered to be racial slurs — describing Hispanic and Latino individuals as “wets” and “tonks” — body-camera footage and text messages cited in new court filings reveal.
“Just plug us in wherever you see some tonks and we’ll jump out,” one agent is quoted as saying, according to a transcript of body camera footage cited in court papers in the Central District of California.
That derogatory term, often used to describe migrants, reportedly references the sound made by slamming a heavy-duty flashlight or baton against an individual’s head, according to U.S. Border Patrol documents obtained by HuffPost in 2024.
During a separate incident in June of 2025 outside a Home Depot in Hollywood, body camera footage captured an agent saying quote: “There was a guy, I’m pretty sure he’s wet he was just sitting in that minivan.”
“Wet” is widely understood as a shorthand for “wetback” — a dehumanizing term for migrants who swim the Rio Grande from Mexico to the U.S.
Evidence also reveals agents repeatedly referring to potential arrestees as “possibles” based on their appearance, and an immigration official acknowledging in a deposition that an individual’s "Hispanic ethnicity” might make him more likely to be targeted for arrest, even as the Trump administration has repeatedly maintained officers are not engaged in racial profiling.
“We should not live in a country where people can be seized based on the color of their skin by masked men,” Annie Lai, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union and co-counsel on the case, told Scripps News.
“It's a kind of storm of circumstances that really make this a predictable outcome, not something that is accidental or that the administration needs to pay more attention to,” Lai added.
The new evidence comes as part of an ongoing lawsuit brought by a coalition of Southern California residents who claim they were the subject of racial profiling by immigration officials.
Last July, U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong granted a temporary restraining order blocking immigration officials from conducting arrests based only upon race, though that decision was ultimately stayed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
RELATED STORY | Supreme Court clears way to end TPS program protections for Haitians and other immigrants
In a brief opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said federal law allows officers to “briefly detain” an individual for questioning if they have “a reasonable suspicion, based on specific articulable facts, that the person being questioned ... is an alien illegally in the United States.’”
The California judge later granted expedited discovery in the case, giving plaintiffs access to agents’ text messages and body camera footage. Lai told Scripps News she expected to uncover further evidence of officers’ wrongdoing, especially as attorneys wait for a ruling on whether immigration agents must turn over their personal devices in addition to government ones.
The new evidence was accompanied by a motion asking the judge to impose a preliminary injunction blocking immigration officials from engaging in racial profiling. Attorneys argue it “flatly disproves the representations Defendants made about their operations” when they asked the Supreme Court to stay the initial block on the policy, and reveals that “race is the predominant characteristic driving Defendants’ stops, and that Defendants’ ongoing stops — including of U.S. citizens — are neither brief nor unintrusive.”
MORE ON IMMIGRATION | New claims of human rights violations center on Texas ICE detention camp
Asked about the new disclosures, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told Scripps News in a statement that federal agents “are focused on protecting the American people — not entertaining performative outrage. Where is the media’s outrage for Angel families who lost a loved one to illegal alien crime?”
The official, who declined to speak on the record, did not answer questions about the new evidence or whether the agents who made those statements had been disciplined.
