Disturbing Court Evidence Exposes Just How Bad Trump's Own Gestapo Has Become
Newly surfaced body cam footage, text messages, and various other documents have pulled the curtain back on the things ICE doesn't want you to see.
Civil rights groups, critics, and experts have long been arguing that Donald Trump’s aggressively cruel immigration tactics employed in his second term have been fueled by pure, unadulterated racism and racial profiling.
A series of newly uncovered court evidence just proved them all right.
Across the country, lawsuits against Trump Administration immigration agencies are emerging at a rapid pace, for a variety of reasons, but almost all of them seem to share one core point, backed by a trove of evidence ranging from body camera footage to personal text messages — agents are casting a dragnet filled to the brim with their own hatred, vitriol, and brazen racism as they indiscriminantly sweep up anyone with brown skin off the streets of LA, Cicago, Minneapolis, and countless other cities acorss the US.
A new report from the New York Times confirms that multiple court filings have contained documents that show US federal agents using horrifying racist slurs against the people they are targeting. Several court filings show proof of agents calling their target “tonks," a deeply derogatory term for Mexican immigrants that is intended to mock the sound of an agent’s heavy flashlight striking an immigrant’s head. In countless instances, individuals who were suspected of being undocumented were openly described as “wet” by Donald Trump’s immigration agents, a shorthand version of the “wetback” slur, coined around the 1920s, based on the idea that Mexican immigrants got their backs wet when crossing the Rio Grande River from Mexico into Texas. One agent who spearheaded an operation in Southern California was found to be describing any individual whose appearance he deemed suspicious (i.e., brown) as “older Hispanic males.”
In the United States of America, law enforcement officers are strictly prohibited from targeting, questioning, or detaining any individual based solely on their race or ethnicity. This was supposed to be a long-settled law, quite literally set in stone within the US Constitution when the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868.
Donald Trump’s Nazi-style approach to American immigration enforcement has managed to pull the rug out from under the Equal Protection Clause, turning the Constitution into an open-ended question and giving immigration agents not only the power to deny anyone they even think may be an undocumented immigrant the protection of the law that’s afforded to them by the Constitution, but actually going so far as to offer these agents a blank permission slip to target them, based on the way they look.
None other than Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh — who is certainly not known for respecting the basic human rights of anyone who’s not a rich, white man — led the charge in dismantling half a century of jurisprudence when he brazenly gave an open-ended racial profiling blessing to any agents hunting undocumented immigrants across the country.
The United States government, under Donald Trump’s purview, continues to maintain that its immigration enforcement operations and tactics are within the scope of compliance with the U.S. Constitution.
The original lawsuit that birthed Kavanaugh’s horrifying albeit temporary decision allowing for racial profiling within the Department of Homeland Security’s agencies, among dozens of other suits just like it, has yet to even fully work its way through the lower courts. It will take countless months to see a true resolution in any of these cases and literal years before the Supreme Court even considers throwing in an additional 2 cents on the matter.
In the meantime, immigration agents continue to behave with abandon while civil rights lawyers across the country continue to quietly collect evidence that they hope will one day serve to bury these monsters in their personal versions of the Nuremberg Trials, with proof that these agencies are openly employing racial profiling tactics in direct violation of the US Constitution.
Racial profiling and immigration are not new legal issues
The Supreme Court opened an avenue for a degree of racial profiling with specific respect to immigration enforcement in 1975, when the Court ruled that race and ethnicity could be employed as one of the factors utilized by agents with regard to traffic stops for cars that were suspected of containing undocumented immigrants. The 1975 ruling was very clear that race and ethnicity could not be the only deciding factor in those cases.
Stanford law professor Jennifer M. Chacón, who specifically studies immigration law, is now questioning whether the US Supreme Court’s 1975 U.S. v. Brignoni-Ponce decision still holds in this modern-day onslaught of racial profiling cases stemming from Donald Trump’s DHS agencies.
Is this still good law, and even if it is, when does agency behavior cross the line of what is permitted?” Professor Chacón questioned.
The facts speak for themselves
In one of the latest batches of depositions connected to a case in Los Angeles, videos and surveillance records show that agents and officers with immigration enforcement were focusing their efforts on hunting out “day laborers.” However, civil rights groups argue that this vague explanation actually simply translates to anyone with dark skin and a non-English accent — a racially motivated move that resulted in countless American citizens also being unlawfully arrested and detained in these massive immigration sweeps.
One sworn declaration from a driver who was subjected to a traffic stop by immigration officials in San Bernardino, California claims that the officer outright told him that he was pulled over “because he looked like a ‘paisa,’” a slang term for a newly arrived immigrant.
In yet another sworn declaration, a dark-skinned, Latino US citizen of Anaheim, California, Angel Santiago Tafolla, said that he was relentlessly chased by immigration agents at the Orange County carwash where he worked, while those same agents outright ignored his light-skinned co-workers. One of the agents discharged a taser within inches of Tafolla, whose body and clothing were wet from his work at the carwash, before ultimately handcuffing him and loading him into a van.
“I kept saying ‘I’m American,’ but they just kept telling me I was Latino, and my documents were false and to stop talking,” Tafolla said in the sworn document.
California is far from the only place in America where immigration agents are employing their own racial hatred as a qualification for their targets. All across the nation, dozens of lawsuits are being filed by civil rights attorneys on behalf of predominantly Black and Latino clients who were allegedly targeted by Trump-era immigration agents based solely on their perceived race and/or ethnicity, skin color, accent, and even work attire.
Upwards of 65 American citizens have allegedly been stopped, harassed, questioned, and even detained by agents simply because they do not look white. According to their sworn statements, many of them were not even allowed to provide agents with their valid ID or passport to prove their citizenship. Many of them were physically assaulted, tased, handcuffed, and some were detained for endless hours before their release.
Mayra Joachín, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who is working on the Los Angeles case, said, “For the individuals that they’re stopping, they don’t have any information about them other than the demographic profile that they appear Latino and working class.”
Attorneys for the U.S. government continue to assert that all immigration operations across the country are highly and specifically targeting, and any use of derogatory or inflammatory language is merely fringe, limited to isolated events which do not serve as evidence of an agency-wide issue. They continue to further cite broad, sweeping authority granted to agents by the federal government to question anyone they believe may not be a US citizen.
Deny, deny, deny and lie
Homeland Security spokeswoman Katherine Currie gave an emailed statement, in which she entirely neglected to address the racial slurs employed by agents and instead focused solely on the allegation that officials are engaging in racial profiling, calling the accusations “disgusting, reckless, and categorically false.”
“What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the U.S. — not their skin color, race or ethnicity,” Currie said in her statement.
Nevertheless, there is cold, hard video footage of agents in Chicago pointing out people on the streets, referring to them as “wet” and “tonks.” In the Los Angeles case, more than a dozen videos, captured by both body cameras on the agents’ person and bystander footage, show officers bypassing people who appeared white while honing in to question and detain nearby men with dark skin.
In a video hailing from Aug. 6, 2025, a group of heavily armed, camouflaged, and masked agents can be seen huddled in the back of a moving truck where a backpack is visible on the floor. One agent can be heard asking, “Whose backpack is that? Tonk? Tonk backpack?”
In a June 19, 2025 video, one agent casually brags to another, saying, “They filled three vans,” as they drove through an LA neighborhood. One of those same agents, later in the footage, recalls seeing a man in a minivan whom he ultimately did not approach, telling his colleagues, “I’m pretty sure he was wet.”
Ultimately, these cases serve as just yet another piece of evidence pointing toward total anarchy within Trump’s federal government. These agents are being armed to the teeth, handed a badge and a mask, and being told with utter conviction that accountability simply is not in the cards for them. Under Trump’s reign of terror, the white man reigns supreme, and they know in their heart of hearts and soul of souls that there’s truly nothing they can’t get away with.