After an immigration raid in Los Angeles last year, a federal agent driving away from the scene can be heard on bodycam footage using a racial slur to describe a man he spotted during the operation.
"There was a guy, I'm pretty sure he was wet, just sitting in that minivan," the agent says, using a shortened form of "wetback," a slur long used to demean Mexican and other Latin American immigrants.
In another video that captures conversation between two agents on patrol in LA, one uses a derogatory term — "tonk" — that's thought to refer to the sound of an agent's flashlight striking a migrant's head.
"There's one right there!" the agent says after spotting someone in a nearby vehicle. "It looked like a tonk in the driver's seat."
"Wetback" and "tonk" are both terms that Border Patrol supervisors in the past have sought to ban their agents from using.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other civil rights groups obtained the bodycam footage — most of it from last year — as part of a lawsuit alleging that ICE and Border Patrol agents are racially profiling. It's part of a legal battle over whether federal officers, in their push to fulfill President Trump's mass deportation agenda, are unconstitutionally rounding people up because they look Latino. The Supreme Court has already preliminarily sided with Trump in the case, even as civil rights attorneys continue gathering evidence to prove that agents are violating the law.
"We now know that the only evidence that those agents used to stop an individual was to racially profile and to identify people on the street who appear to look Latino and working class," said Mayra Joachin, one of the ACLU's attorneys in the case.
The Department of Homeland Security has consistently denied allegations that ICE and Border Patrol officers target people based on their race.
The search for evidence of racial profiling
The ACLU and other groups filed the case last year, not long after immigration agents began their aggressive and highly visible raids to round up day laborers and construction workers, car wash employees and street vendors across Los Angeles.
A federal judge agreed with the civil rights groups that ICE and Border Patrol appeared to be rounding people up indiscriminately based on their race, occupations and the fact that they spoke Spanish. She issued an emergency order telling agents not to do that.
But the Supreme Court's conservative majority tossed her ruling out. Their brief order did not say why. The only hints came in a concurrence from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote that agents could use someone's "apparent ethnicity" to arrive at a suspicion that someone they come across in public is in the country illegally, as long as their suspicion was also based on other "salient factors." He listed high rates of workers without legal status in certain industries, and Spanish language use, as examples of other factors. Kavanaugh later clarified that "officers must not make interior immigration stops or arrests based on race or ethnicity."
In the months since the Supreme Court weighed in, attorneys have been working to uncover evidence that would bolster their argument that race is the only consistent factor immigration agents have been considering. The LA federal judge presiding over the lawsuit, Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, ordered the Department of Homeland Security to turn over bodycam footage, agents' text messages, and other evidence that could provide insight into how they are deciding who to stop.
DHS has maintained that its agents do not racially profile or round people up indiscriminately, and has said that "D.H.S. enforcement operations are highly targeted, and officers do their due diligence. We know who we are targeting ahead of time."
The ACLU argues the videos and documents DHS has turned over undermine those claims.
In a text message conversation between immigration agents discussing operations, one of them wrote that there were "tonks everywhere selling food" in the city of Long Beach, in south Los Angeles County. They also refer to people as "stupid" and "wet."
In another bodycam video, from an operation in which agents detained and then later released at least two U.S. citizens, an agent is heard telling one of his partners that "one tonk got away." In a different video of the same incident, one of the U.S. citizens detained in that operation, who later became a plaintiff in the ACLU's lawsuit, can be heard accusing agents of targeting him because he looked Mexican.
And in a court filing, attorneys described an agent who was heard saying "Get out and start grabbing people," before an operation in which at least one legal resident was detained.
Civil rights lawyers want new restrictions on immigration agents
In response to questions from NPR about the footage, the Department of Homeland Security provided a brief statement without directly acknowledging the videos.
"Our 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 statement read, using the Trump administration's preferred term for families affected by crimes committed by immigrants.
The videos and text messages, filed by the ACLU to support its request for an injunction against ICE and Border Patrol, will be key evidence when attorneys appear before Judge Frimpong in September asking her to place new restrictions on immigration agents. The ACLU says federal agents continue their roving enforcement operations in Los Angeles, even as the administration has moved to detain people more quietly.
Joachin, of the ACLU, said that before stopping and detaining someone, immigration agents are required to know something about the person that leads them to suspect the person is in the U.S. without legal status. Not having that, she said, is a violation of the Constitution's prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure.
"Immigration agents are required to have articulable, specific facts," Joachin said. "And we're telling the court that its order should explicitly bar immigration agents from using race as a factor when they're developing reasonable suspicion."
The civil rights attorneys also want the judge to order immigration agents to document what specifically led to their suspicion for each person they detain.
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