Border Patrol agents involved in last year's federal takeover of Los Angeles used slurs to refer to Latinos while carrying out patrol and arrest operations, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.

The conduct took place under former Border Patrol leader Greg Bovino, who became known for overseeing aggressive crackdowns against migrants and protesters in multiple cities.

According to body camera footage and text messages cited in a court filing seeking to bar agents from making stops based on racial profiling, agents referred to people with terms including “tonk” and “wet.” The filing underscores why the language matters beyond the offensive terms themselves: it is being cited in a challenge over whether agents made stops based on race, a question that has drawn scrutiny in immigration enforcement operations in major cities.

“Wet” is a shortened form of a well-known slur for Latinos. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote on X that “tonk” is “a Border Patrol slur that refers to the sound a metal flashlight makes when used to beat a migrant in the head.”

The report cited several examples. After a June raid at a 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.” In another instance, a text chain showed one agent saying he saw “tonks everywhere selling food,” while a separate video recorded an agent saying, “Just plug us in wherever you see some tonks and we’ll jump out.”

Bovino was later pushed aside and pressed into retirement after a troubled campaign in Minneapolis in which ICE agents fatally shot Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

He has since continued to promote conspiracy theories in online interviews, including his unfounded claim that 100 million people are illegally in the United States and should be deported. That figure is more than five times higher than real estimates and would imply that about one in four people in the country is unauthorized.