Javier Ramirez was handcuffed behind an unmarked automotive, bruised and confused, when immigration brokers used a phrase he had by no means heard earlier than.
It was June 2025, they usually have been bragging in regards to the raids within the Los Angeles space that swept up a whole bunch of immigrants — and some U.S. residents, like Ramirez. The unfamiliar phrase caught Ramirez’s ear.
Tonk.
“I puzzled what that meant — I assumed it was some code,” the 33-year-old tow truck driver advised me over a Zoom name this week. “However I didn’t make a giant fuss about it then.”
Masked males had thrown him to the bottom exterior a tow yard in Montebello, for causes they wouldn’t reveal. He ended up within the automotive with a person detained in one other roundup, headed for the Metropolitan Detention Middle in downtown Los Angeles.
The colour disappeared from Ramirez’s face once I defined what “tonk” means.
For at the least half a century, Border Patrol employees have used the onomatopoeic phrase, referring to the sound of somebody getting hit, as slang for undocumented immigrants. Physique digital camera footage and textual content chains from final summer time’s immigration raids, launched this week in a courtroom submitting, captures brokers throwing round anti-immigrant insults like “moist” and “tonk” with the identical ease that the remainder of us say “and” or “the.”
Probably the most egregious instance, I advised Ramirez, was directed at him and his good friend, fellow U.S. citizen Brian Gavidia.
A video reveals an agent shouting, “One tonk f— acquired away, dude!” as colleagues manhandle the pair. The identical agent, who spoke with a Chicano accent, later sped off in a automobile whereas asking in Spanglish, “¿Alguien arresto un tonk, güey?” — Did somebody arrest a tonk, man?
“Oh, wow, OK, that’s actually dangerous,” Ramirez lastly stated, laughing bitterly whereas gathering his ideas. “It’s form of hurtful. They’re simply assuming who I’m.”
Ramirez requested his legal professional, Luis Castillo, if the brokers who accosted him “had violence on their thoughts after they used that phrase.”
“You’re getting a double whammy,” the longtime civil rights lawyer replied. “They’re hitting you twice, bodily and psychologically.”
No, Luis: they’re hitting us all.
Brian Gavidia stands in a car parking zone subsequent to East Los Angeles School in Monterey Park in 2025 a day after he and his good friend have been roughed up by immigration brokers exterior a tow yard in Montebello. The 2 are suing the federal authorities for violating their civil rights.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Instances)
When you’re nonetheless doubting that racist violence fuels President Trump’s deportation deluge, simply contemplate what Gavidia and Ramirez have been by way of.
La migra roughed them up whilst they screamed that they’d paperwork to show their U.S. citizenship. They took Gavidia’s Actual ID and by no means returned it. Ramirez was detained for 5 days and charged with making an attempt to assault a federal officer and intervene with their work — a case that went nowhere as a result of he did no such issues.
The American Civil Liberties Union and Public Counsel, together with different teams and personal attorneys, included the physique cam footage in a courtroom submitting asking a federal choose to bar immigration brokers from making stops based mostly on racial profiling.
Gavidia is a part of that lawsuit, whereas Ramirez has sued individually. Now, the 2 males are extra sure than ever that the Trump administration’s deportation technique isn’t about getting the worst of the worst.
To la migra, all Latinos are tonks.
“I by no means even heard the phrase, however as soon as [lawyers] advised me the reason of what it meant, I used to be disgusted immediately,” stated Gavidia, 30, who fixes up and sells vehicles. “They already knew what they have been coming to do. We advised them we have been Individuals. It didn’t matter. We have been brown, and that was sufficient.”
“I noticed [the tonk video] 300 instances,” Gavidia added, “and it’s giving me extra trauma.”
“Tonk” has been a grimy little secret of the Border Patrol for many years — office lingo exhibiting that the banality of evil that’s la migra on its finest days has remodeled into one thing far uglier underneath Trump.
The slur is so vile — predicated on violence by regulation enforcement, not like ethnic jabs that insult meals or tradition — that it has by no means crossed over into mainstream English. “Tonk” in its anti-immigrant that means doesn’t seem within the Merriam-Webster dictionary and even the Dictionary of American Regional English, the premier educational assortment of American slang.
And that’s precisely how the Border Patrol likes it.
The earliest use of “tonk” to demean immigrants that I’ve been capable of finding is in a 1976 e book by Paul Schuster Taylor, an early pioneer of Mexican American research finest identified for documenting the plight of Mud Bowl refugees alongside together with his spouse, photographer Dorothea Lange.
Taylor quoted a Border Patrol inspector referring to Mexicans as “tonks” however supplied no definition. In a 1978 listening to, Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Leonel Castillo stated the slur was “type of like the brand new time period” for “wets.”
Castillo — no relation to Luis — nonetheless defended his brokers’ use of anti-immigrant phrases.
“I feel it’s the best way — the tone through which you employ it, after which the way you deal with folks,” he stated, sustaining that the verbiage was ingrained within the “very tremendous gents” who labored underneath him.
“It’s very arduous to vary them,” he stated. “However they’re not essentially dangerous folks.”
A 12 months later, an nameless Border Patrol agent writing for the white supremacist publication Instauration debunked Castillo’s apologia. He claimed that “tonk” derived from the thudding noise when brokers smashed a flashlight on an immigrant’s head.
“The Anglos of the Border Patrol usually are not as intimidated by federal tips as folks would possibly assume,” the agent wrote. “Now we have our personal strategies of interrogation within the desert.”
San Diego State English professor William Nericcio has spent his profession learning anti-Mexican hate. He grew up round Laredo, Texas, within the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties with “guys and their dads who labored in Border Patrol as a result of it was a great job.”
But he hadn’t heard of “tonk,” both.
Immigration brokers detain two males at a automotive wash in Montebello, Calif., in 2025.
(Gregory Bull / Related Press)
“A drum roll of anti-Mexican violence turns right into a soundtrack — wetback, beaner, spic and now, tonk,” Nericcio responded once I requested why the slur has caught for thus lengthy amongst immigration brokers. “Of all these anti-Mexican phrases, that is the one one which instantly connects to an act of violence. It’s a factor of satisfaction while you say it — ‘Hey boss, I acquired a tonk at present! The place’s my bonus?’ It’s glory days for them.”
The informal use of “tonk” by la migra ultimately grew to become a PR embarrassment even for the Trump administration. In 2019, throughout Trump’s first time period, a Customs and Border Safety spokesperson advised an Arizona public radio station that the slur “is now thought of a derogatory time period and CBP doesn’t condone its use.”
This time round, a Division of Homeland Safety spokesperson advised my Instances colleagues that “brokers are centered on defending the American folks — not entertaining performative outrage.”
CBP didn’t reply to my a number of requests for remark about whether or not its inside tips proceed to discourage “tonk” and whether or not brokers face any self-discipline for utilizing it.
When you’re not disgusted by this devolution in protocol, I’m unsure what can presumably disgust you.
ACLU lawyer Mayra Joachin stated the physique cam footage is “clear proof that these stops have been all the time about people’ look of being Latino working class” and is proof of the “tradition of racism underlying” the Trump administration’s deportation technique.
How are Gavidia and Ramirez feeling now, after being known as a racist slur they hadn’t even identified existed and that doesn’t even technically apply to them?
“When you’re a U.S. citizen, you possibly can’t be free within the U.S.,” Ramirez stated. What occurred to him “can occur to anybody, it may well occur to their children and household, and when it occurs to their household, that’s after they’re going to see the reality of what’s taking place.”
Gavidia, who voted for Trump in 2024, stated that immigration brokers assume they “are above the Structure and regulation.”
“That’s unhappy and disgusting,” he stated. “If we don’t cease this and combat this now, it’s going to worsen and worse.”
