A new report from HuffPost has revealed some of the dehumanizing language that U.S. Border Patrol agents have used internally to malign migrants. The emails and text messages portray an agency infested with anti-immigrant bigotry — animus that has been fueled by conservative lawmakers and media figures.
As many Republicans falsely portray immigrants as violent invaders seeking to destroy American life, the report shows how Border Patrol agents — the tip of the spear when it comes to immigration enforcement — deploy similar bigotry on the job.
The report centers on the widespread use of a degrading word, “tonk,” to refer to migrants. The word’s origins are unclear, with some agents contending it began as an innocuous acronym — but many in the Border Patrol understand it to refer to “the sound made by slamming a heavy-duty flashlight or baton over a migrant’s head,” according to the report.
Through a Freedom of Information Act request, HuffPost obtained several examples of border agents using the slur in recent years — including some in supervisory roles.
For instance:
An email sent by the watch commander for the Border Patrol’s Wellton Station in the Yuma Sector in Arizona carried the subject line ‘American TONK’ and the comment ‘The future…’ with a link to a news story about a brown-skinned woman with a Spanish surname breastfeeding her child at Disneyland.
And this:
A text chain between Border Patrol employees described migrants not just as ‘tonks’ but also as ‘an influx of rats’ from ‘whatamala, el salvado and hondodas.’ In another text chain, Border Patrol personnel mocked a co-worker for ‘marrying a tonk’ because ‘he cant find a legal chick here WOW.’
And this, too:
Photo files sent by email were often named ‘tonk.’ Subject lines and attached files contained terms including ‘assaultive tonk,’ ‘freezing tonk,’ ‘tonk phone’ and ‘familia tonk.’
Although this behavior is sick and deeply disturbing, it’s hardly shocking. In a 2021 research paper, “The Legacy of Racism within the U.S. Border Patrol,” academics Katy Murdza and Walter Ewing detailed how this type of bigotry dates back to the organization’s founding a century ago.
“A culture of racism within the Border Patrol has persisted throughout its history,” they wrote. “Repeated reports have surfaced of agents using racial slurs, sexual comments, and other offensive language.”
The researchers also wrote that some agents “have reported that the internal culture results in ‘pseudospeciation,’ in which a different cultural group is thought of as another species.” (That sounds like a perfect description of the HuffPost report, to be honest.) They also noted that anti-immigrant misconduct is not limited to slurs and that it also occurs through violent crackdowns and medical neglect.
I see this permissive culture of mistreatment as a media-assisted moral crisis. Through conservative media, millions of Americans are fed a steady diet of news reports that frame Latinos as criminal threats. And Republican lawmakers have fueled this hysteria with bills meant to legitimize it.
All the while, U.S. news outlets have done a poor job of covering anti-Latino racism. This is a problem that Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, has sought to solve for years, by the way. Because without a fix, the result is what we see today: rank bigotry pervading nearly every crevice of American life, including the emails and texts of our Border Patrol agents.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.