Court documents made public this week show that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents deployed to the Los Angeles area used racial slurs in text messages to describe people targeted during street-level immigration raids in mid-2025. The disclosures surfaced in a civil rights lawsuit against the Trump administration and offer a rare look at the internal communications of officers carrying out enforcement sweeps that have faced sustained legal and political scrutiny.

The Los Angeles Times independently corroborated on July 27, 2026, that immigration agents used racial slurs when referring to Latinos during Los Angeles operations, basing its reporting on the same court records (Los Angeles Times). The Guardian, publishing the following day, reported additional details drawn from the case docket (The Guardian). News from the States also confirmed the contents of the messages (News from the States).

The slurs appear in a text-message chain among agents conducting field operations. On July 2, 2025, one agent wrote: "Some of these people are stupid. Why would you post on social media that you're wet," using an abbreviated version of a slur against undocumented Mexicans. Two days later, on July 4, 2025, an unidentified agent wrote in a text chain: "btw tonks everywhere selling food for the 4th festivities in long beach right now." Another message in the chain read, "Pretty sure he's wet." The Los Angeles Times reported that the chain included an agent writing "He was just sitting in that minivan" regarding a subject of the immigration operations. These records were entered into the case docket gov.uscourts.cacd.975351.

The messages were disclosed in a motion filed in a lawsuit brought by five men in June 2025. The plaintiffs allege unlawful stop and arrest practices by ICE agents during Los Angeles raids. Their lawyers have asked a federal judge to bar any further detention stops based on race or socioeconomic status. Three of the plaintiffs were arrested in June 2025 while waiting at a bus stop to be picked up for work. A fourth plaintiff, a U.S. citizen, had his arm twisted and was pushed against a gate during questioning by masked immigration agents.

In a December 2025 deposition — a formal sworn interview used to gather evidence before trial — an ICE officer who led the bus stop operation described individuals waiting for work as "older Hispanic males" and suggested they were flagged as possibly undocumented. That characterization aligns with the plaintiffs' central claim that enforcement decisions were driven by perceived ethnicity rather than individualized suspicion, the legal standard requiring officers to have specific, articulable facts about a particular person before stopping them. Maya Joachin, deputy director of immigrants' rights at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, stated that the records evidenced "a pattern of racial profiling."

Angel Santiago Tafolla, an Anaheim resident and U.S. citizen who is not a plaintiff, provided a court declaration describing a separate encounter. Tafolla stated that ICE agents swept through a car wash in Orange County, handcuffed him, and placed him in a van before realizing he was a citizen. His account reinforces the plaintiffs' contention that the enforcement dragnet — a broad, sweeping operation that casts a wide net — caught individuals without any basis for immigration inquiry.

The broader political context for these operations is defined by the Trump administration's posture toward Los Angeles. Donald Trump sent the National Guard to Los Angeles, citing a need to "liberate" the city from a "migrant invasion." That framing has shaped the federal government's defense of its enforcement strategy. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told CalMatters: "Our agents are focused on protecting the American people – not entertaining performative outrage."

The Department of Homeland Security's dismissive response frames the lawsuit as political theater. But the internal messages, entered into the federal court record, are not advocacy materials; they are agent-generated communications. The distinction matters both procedurally and politically. When officers conducting stops use derogatory terms for the populations they are policing, plaintiffs can argue that the Fourth Amendment's requirement of individualized suspicion — the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures — is structurally unmet, not merely broken in isolated instances. The motion for an injunction, if granted, would impose judicial constraints on the criteria ICE may use to initiate stops, potentially redefining the operational parameters of Los Angeles-area enforcement.

The case also turns on the tension between executive assertions of enforcement authority and judicial oversight of the methods used. The plaintiffs are U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike, and the inclusion of a citizen who was physically restrained during questioning illustrates the legal vulnerability ICE faces when stops are based on apparent ethnicity. Whether a federal judge will impose a race- and class-based injunction on detention stops is the pivotal question. The court's determination will likely hinge on whether the text messages and deposition testimony are treated as isolated conduct or as evidence of a systematic decision-making protocol within the agency's Los Angeles operations.