Commentary: The banality of evil in the Border Patrol's secret anti-immigrant slur

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Set us as preferred Javier Ramirez was handcuffed in the back of an unmarked car, bruised and confused, when immigration agents used a word he had never heard before.It was June 2025, and they were bragging about the raids in the Los Angeles area that swept up hundreds of immigrants — and a few U.S.citizens, like Ramirez.

The unfamiliar word caught Ramirez’s ear.Tonk.“I wondered what that meant — I thought it was some code,” the 33-year-old tow truck driver told me over a Zoom call this week.

“But I didn’t make a big fuss about it then.” California Body camera footage and forensically recovered texts, which provide a window into the mindset of agents who conducted raids throughout the L.A.area, were detailed in a 37-page motion for a preliminary injunction filed Monday.Masked men had thrown him to the ground outside a tow yard in Montebello, for reasons they wouldn’t divulge.

He ended up in the car with a man detained in another roundup, headed for the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles.The color disappeared from Ramirez’s face when I explained what “tonk” means.For at least half a century, Border Patrol workers have used the onomatopoeic word, referring to the sound of someone getting hit, as slang for undocumented immigrants.Body camera footage and text chains from last summer’s immigration raids, released this week in a court filing, captures agents throwing around anti-immigrant insults like “wet” and “tonk” with the same ease that the rest of us say “and” or “the.” The most egregious example, I told Ramirez, was directed at him and his friend, fellow U.S.

citizen Brian Gavidia.A video shows an agent shouting, “One tonk f— got away, dude!” as colleagues manhandle the pair.

The same agent, who spoke with a Chicano accent, later sped off in a vehicle whil...