Court filing revealed ICE, Border Patrol agents used racial slurs to target Latinos during Los Angeles immigration sweeps

On July 27, 2026, plaintiffs in Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, citing newly disclosed text messages, bodycam footage, and deposition testimony showing federal immigration agents used racial slurs to identify and target Latino people during ongoing immigration sweeps in the Los Angeles area. In one text message cited in the filing, an agent wrote, "just plug us in wherever you see some tonks and we'll jump out"; in bodycam footage, a Border Patrol agent at a Hollywood Home Depot said of a man in a minivan, "I'm pretty sure he's wet." "Tonk" is a term Border Patrol agents have used that U.S. Customs and Border Protection itself instructed agents in 2019 was inappropriate due to its derogatory origin.

The filing argues these records show an "ongoing campaign of suspicionless and discriminatory detentive stops" that continued after the high-profile street raids of summer 2025 officially ended, undercutting the government's representation to the U.S. Supreme Court that agents relied on individualized intelligence rather than race when deciding whom to stop. One ICE agent admitted in a deposition that the agency was "still doing the same thing" as the earlier operation "just with a different name." The filing also cites a May 2025 directive from ICE headquarters instructing field officers to increase arrest numbers, and testimony that of roughly 1,400 Border Patrol agents involved in the Los Angeles operations, more than half had used personal cell phones for the work, complicating discovery.

Plaintiffs are represented by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California along with a coalition of advocacy organizations and private attorneys, who argue the stops relied on perceived race or ethnicity rather than lawful, individualized suspicion, sweeping up U.S. citizens in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The case follows an earlier temporary restraining order in the litigation that the U.S. Supreme Court stayed in September 2025, allowing the practices to continue while the case proceeds; the newly filed evidence is offered in support of a renewed injunction request before U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong.