Border Patrol agents involved in last year’s federal takeover of Los Angeles tossed around slurs to refer to Latinos while going about their patrol and arrest work, reported the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday.
This occurred under the command of former Border Patrol leader Greg Bovino, who became infamous for overseeing brutal crackdowns against migrants and protesters alike in every city he went to.
“The agents called them things like ‘tonk’ and ‘wet,’” according to body camera footage and text messages detailed in a court filing asking a federal judge to bar agents from making stops based on racial profiling.
“Wet” is a shortened form of a notorious slur for Latinos, while “tonk,” noted American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick on X, is “a Border Patrol slur that refers to the sound a metal flashlight makes when used to beat a migrant in the head.”
For example, noted the report, “After a June raid at Home Depot in Hollywood, body camera footage captured an agent saying: ‘There was a guy, I’m pretty sure he’s wet; he was just sitting in that minivan.’” Meanwhile, a text chain had one agent saying he saw “tonks everywhere selling food,” and another video in which an agent stated, “Just plug us in wherever you see some tonks and we’ll jump out.”
Bovino was pushed aside and pressed into retirement after a disastrous campaign in Minneapolis that saw ICE agents fatally shoot Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
He has since unabashedly continued to spread conspiracy theories in online interviews, including his unfounded belief that there are 100 million people in the United States illegally to deport — a figure more than five times the real estimates, and which would make around 1 in 4 people in the country unauthorized.
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