This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com They told us it wasn’t about race. Then the bodycams came out. For over a year, the administration insisted its immigration crackdown was targeted — that agents weren’t stopping people for being Latino, and that profiling claims were, in a DHS spokeswoman’s words, “disgusting, reckless, and categorically false.” Now there’s footage. And based on the evidence, what these agents are doing looks disgusting, reckless, and categorically true. A New York Times investigation reviewed court evidence from more than a dozen cases across the country — body-camera footage, bystander video, text messages, court filings — 169 hours of video across 459 clips. What comes out of it is a disturbing picture of how these sweeps actually ran. In multiple court filings, agents referred to targets as “tonks” — a derogatory term for Mexican immigrants that, per the Times, is meant to evoke the sound of a flashlight hitting someone in the head. Other footage catches an agent calling a man “wet,” short for the slur “w*****k.” Another, in a Southern California operation, flagged people he considered suspicious as “older Hispanic males.” Now, I spent two decades in law enforcement, and anyone who tells you cops never say ugly things behind closed doors is lying to you. But there’s a difference between someone saying something offensive and that language showing up right next to evidence that it’s shaping who gets stopped. That’s where this stops being a bad joke and becomes a constitutional problem. In San Bernardino, a driver said in a sworn declaration that an officer told him he’d been pulled over because he looked like a “paisa.” Then there’s Angel Santiago Tafolla, a U.S. citizen working at a carwash in Anaheim. According to his declaration, agents chased him — a dark-skinned Latino man — while ignoring his lighter-skinned coworkers. An agent arced a Taser in front of him while his clothes were still wet from work. They cuffed him and loaded him into a van. And the whole time, he kept telling them the thing that should have ended it: “I’m American.” According to his account, they told him he was Latino, that his documents were fake, and that he should stop talking. Sit with that. A citizen tells federal officers he’s American, shows his papers, and they tell him the papers are fake — because they’ve already decided who he is. Based on what? That’s the question at the center of these lawsuits, and it isn’t one man. According to filings reviewed by the Times, at least 65 U.S. citizens were stopped, questioned, or detained during these operations. Many were Black or Latino. Some said agents refused to accept passports or valid licenses. Several were threatened with Tasers, tackled, or handcuffed. Some were held for hours. And civil rights lawyers think they know why it keeps happening: quotas. Court filings describe agents under enormous pressure to run up arrests — the national target reportedly as high as 3,000 a day. That changes everything about how you police. Real investigation means you develop information, identify a person, build reasonable suspicion. But if someone tells you to produce 3,000 bodies today, you’re not investigating anymore. You’re doing volume. So roving teams converged on the places they expected to find Latino workers — carwashes, construction sites, Home Depot lots — and leaned on broad traits: looks Latino, darker skin, an accent, day-laborer clothes. Footage from Los Angeles, civil rights lawyers say, shows agents walking past people who appeared white to approach Latino men nearby, masked and armed, chatting about targets and tallying how many they’d grabbed. That is not how professional law enforcement works. Race can be part of a suspect description — if I’m looking for a specific 35-year-old Latino man in a blue jacket, ethnicity is obviously in the mix. But “Latino guy outside Home Depot” is not a suspect description. For more than 50 years the constitutional rule has been that immigration agents need a specific factual basis to stop someone and can’t use ethnicity as the sole factor. A 1975 Supreme Court decision let ethnicity count as one factor in certain situations — not the only one. Even that line is now being tested: Justice Brett Kavanaugh gave provisional support to broader consideration of characteristics including ethnicity while the litigation continues. It wasn’t a ruling on the merits, but legal experts say it may have emboldened agents in the field. The government denies any agencywide profiling policy — says the operations are targeted, that isolated offensive language doesn’t establish policy, and that agents can briefly question people they reasonably suspect are here illegally. Fine. Then explain the evidence. Explain why citizens’ passports and licenses weren’t accepted. Explain why a man was told he was Latino after he said, over and over, that he was American. Explain footage that appears to show agents skipping white people to approach Latino men. And explain why federal officers on official duty were driving around calling people “tonks” and “wet.” Here’s the part both sides should be able to hold at once: you can support deporting people who are here illegally and demand that federal law enforcement follow the Constitution. Those aren’t in conflict. I’ve said it before — give someone a badge, a gun, and the power to take away another person’s freedom, and the standard goes up, not down. When leaders demand enormous arrest numbers and celebrate aggressive sweeps, don’t act shocked when quantity replaces investigation. That’s how innocent people get swept up. That’s how citizens get handcuffed. That’s how “he looked Latino” becomes law enforcement intelligence. These cases are moving through courts across the country, and some may end up back at the Supreme Court. When they do, the justices won’t be weighing a hypothetical. They’ll have body cameras, text messages, sworn declarations, and citizens who were detained. That’s exactly what the cameras are for — they don’t care what the press release says. They show what happened. And now we can hear what some of these agents were saying when they thought the only people listening were each other. 🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!
