Asked a simple question, whether its officers had broken the rules by using racial slurs, the Department of Homeland Security offered everything except an answer.
New court filings in a California civil-rights case allege that federal immigration agents referred to Latinos with racial slurs during last year's mass enforcement sweeps, citing body-camera footage and text messages.
Confronted with the evidence, DHS declined to say whether the language violated its policies, instead dismissing the reporting as 'performative outrage' and redirecting attention to victims of crimes committed by people in the country illegally.
The response has drawn accusations that the department is shielding conduct it will not defend on the merits.
The Language Captured in Footage and Texts
The material emerged in filings tied to a lawsuit over 'Operation at Large', the surge of immigration enforcement that swept Southern California in the summer of 2025. According to evidence, officers referred to Hispanic and Latino people using terms widely recognised as anti-Latino slurs, among them 'wets' and 'tonks'.
In one clip, an agent is heard saying of a man in a parked vehicle, 'There was a guy, I'm pretty sure he's wet, he was just sitting in that minivan,' using what the report describes as a shortened form of a slur.
The first term derives from a decades-old ethnic slur for Mexican immigrants; the second is a derogatory term long used within some law-enforcement circles for migrants. Their appearance in official footage and internal messages is what the plaintiffs say lays bare the mindset behind the stops.
'This filing should shock the conscience,' said Mayra Joachim, deputy director of immigrants' rights at the ACLU of Southern California, which brought the case. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of people, including US citizens, who say they were stopped, questioned and in some cases detained by immigration agents in California's Central District.
A Non-Answer From the Department
Presented with the footage, DHS sidestepped the central question. Asked directly by ABC News whether using such slurs breaches departmental policy, a spokesperson did not address it, saying only that 'our agents are focused on protecting the American people, not entertaining performative outrage'.
The statement pivoted to a familiar theme. 'Where is the media's outrage for Angel families who lost a loved one to illegal alien crime?' the spokesperson asked, using the administration's term for relatives of people killed by immigrants in the country unlawfully.
The department did not say whether any agent would face review, discipline or retraining over the language.
The refusal to engage with the policy question is itself notable, because DHS, like most law-enforcement bodies, maintains conduct standards that ordinarily prohibit the use of racial slurs by officers on duty. By declining to say whether those standards were breached, the department left open whether it considers the language a violation at all.
A Profiling Fight Already Before the Courts
The slurs surfaced within a larger legal battle over how the raids were conducted. US District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong had earlier issued a temporary restraining order barring agents from stopping people based solely on race, a ruling the Supreme Court later stayed, allowing the challenged practices to continue while the litigation proceeds.
For the plaintiffs, the language in the filings is evidence that the stops were driven by ethnicity rather than any lawful basis. 'A year ago, farm workers across California were terrorised by brutal and unconstitutional raids based on racial and class profiling,' said Teresa Romero, president of the United Farm Workers, a plaintiff in the case, adding that the fear those raids created still lingers.
The case is set to continue before Judge Frimpong in the autumn. Until then, the record contains an accusation, supported by the government's own recordings, and a department that has answered it with a question of its own rather than a defence of its agents' words.
