‘I’m pretty sure he’s a wetback’: Lawsuit attributes racist slurs to immigration agents in Los Angeles

The remark was recorded on the body camera of a Border Patrol agent searching for undocumented people inside a Home Depot in Hollywood. “There was a guy, I’m pretty sure he’s a mojado,” the officer said, using a variant of a derogatory term — “wetback” — that has been used for decades to refer to undocumented migrants who cross the Rio Grande by swimming. On another occasion, before an operation in Los Angeles, another agent warned: “There are tonks everywhere selling food.” Tonks is not police code but an insult that refers to the sound a flashlight makes when it strikes a migrant’s head, a…