Court filings show ICE agents used slurs in Los Angeles raids

Body-camera footage and text messages filed in federal court show Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Los Angeles using slurs to refer to Latinos, including “wet” and “tonk” or “tonks.” The material was submitted in Vasquez Perdomo v. Mullin and came from immigration enforcement operations in Los Angeles last summer.

The filings were tied to a bid to stop discriminatory stops and sweeps, with plaintiffs asking a federal judge to bar racial profiling by immigration agents. The American Civil Liberties Union said the records surfaced alongside claims that federal immigration stops had targeted Latino communities in ways civil rights lawyers say violated constitutional protections.

The case has taken on added weight because of the Supreme Court’s Sept. 8, 2025, decision allowing federal officers to more freely make immigration stops in Los Angeles. In the lead-up to that ruling, U.S. District Judge Maame E. Frimpong had found a “mountain of evidence” that roving patrols were making indiscriminate arrests, a finding that sharpened the debate over how much discretion ICE agents should have in the field.

A Los Angeles Times image caption placed federal immigration agents near MacArthur Park in July 2025, underscoring how visible those operations became in Southern California neighborhoods with large Latino populations. The allegations now center not only on where agents stopped people, but on the language used in the course of those operations and what that language may reveal about enforcement culture inside the agency’s Los Angeles operations.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California said on July 28, 2026, that plaintiffs in Vasquez Perdomo v. Mullin asked a federal court to block discriminatory stops after government records surfaced showing racial profiling in federal immigration stops. Civil liberties groups, including the ACLU of Wisconsin, have argued since the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling that it gave ICE broader latitude to profile Latinos. The new filings put a concrete record behind those warnings, with body-camera video and texts now part of the court file as judges weigh how to police bias, protect due process, and preserve public trust in federal immigration enforcement.