The cameras were recording as federal agents moved through Los Angeles—and the language they allegedly used when they thought the public was not listening has ignited a disturbing new controversy.

Body-camera footage and internal text messages cited in a federal court filing reportedly show Border Patrol agents using offensive slurs for Latinos while discussing surveillance operations, workplace raids and potential arrests.

The revelations, detailed Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times, offer a deeply troubling glimpse into the culture surrounding last year’s federal immigration crackdown in the city.

Agents were reportedly captured using terms including “wet” and “tonk”—language widely recognized as dehumanizing Border Patrol slang directed at migrants and Latino people.

The words did not appear in isolated online comments made years before the agents joined the government. According to the filing, they were used while federal personnel were actively performing official duties.

That distinction has transformed the disclosures from an episode of personal misconduct into a larger constitutional question: Were people being targeted for investigation because agents associated their appearance, language or occupation with unlawful immigration status?

Civil-rights attorneys are asking a federal judge to prohibit agents from making stops based on racial profiling. The body-camera recordings and messages were submitted as evidence supporting that request.

One video reportedly came from a June operation near a Home Depot in Hollywood. After the raid, an agent was recorded looking toward a man sitting in a minivan and suggesting that he was likely undocumented—without the report identifying any clear evidence supporting that assumption.

Other material was even more direct.

In one text exchange, an agent claimed to see people described by the slur “everywhere selling food.” In another recording, an agent told colleagues to place his team wherever they saw people identified with the same term, promising that agents would “jump out.”

The language suggested a method of enforcement driven not by individualized evidence but by generalizations about Latino workers, food vendors and people gathered in public spaces.

That is precisely what makes the footage so consequential.

Federal immigration agents have legal authority to investigate suspected violations. But ethnicity, skin color, accent or presence at a particular workplace cannot, by themselves, establish that someone is unlawfully present in the United States.

When agents use racialized language while deciding where to deploy, critics argue, it raises fears that prejudice may be influencing official decisions.

The operations occurred under the leadership of former senior Border Patrol official Greg Bovino, who became one of the most recognizable figures in the administration’s aggressive immigration campaign.

Bovino oversaw heavily criticized enforcement operations involving migrants and protesters in several American cities. His tactics made him a hero to supporters demanding mass arrests, but a symbol of federal overreach to civil-rights advocates and local officials.

He was eventually removed from his prominent role and pushed into retirement following a deeply controversial operation in Minneapolis, where federal immigration agents fatally shot Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

The newly disclosed recordings now threaten to intensify scrutiny of the leadership culture surrounding those deployments.

They also undermine repeated government claims that immigration operations are conducted exclusively through careful, intelligence-based targeting.

If agents were deciding where to “jump out” based on seeing Latino food vendors—or casually presuming that a man in a minivan was undocumented—the public may reasonably question how much evidence was required before people were confronted or detained.

Bovino has remained active in online interviews since leaving his position. He has promoted an unsupported claim that approximately 100 million people are living illegally in the United States.

That figure is more than five times higher than widely accepted estimates. It would mean nearly one-quarter of the entire American population lacked lawful status—an extraordinary assertion unsupported by mainstream demographic research.

Exaggerated numbers can have real consequences.

Presenting unauthorized immigration as overwhelmingly larger than evidence indicates can create political support for more extreme enforcement. When that rhetoric is paired with agents allegedly using racial slurs in the field, the result is a crisis of public trust.

The court filing does not automatically prove that every stop conducted during the Los Angeles operation was unlawful. Nor does the reported language establish misconduct by every Border Patrol employee.

But it provides evidence that judges, agency leaders and lawmakers cannot responsibly dismiss.

Body cameras are designed to create accountability during encounters between government officials and the public. In this case, they may have documented something occurring before an encounter even began: how agents talked about the people they were preparing to approach.

The scandal is therefore not only about offensive words.

It is about what those words may reveal—who agents believed looked suspicious, how enforcement targets were selected and whether federal power was deployed through a lens of racial prejudice.

The agents wore badges. The government gave them authority.

But the cameras recorded the language behind that authority—and now a federal court may decide what it means.