Court Records Show Federal Agents Used Slurs While Targeting People During Immigration Sweeps
Here are the morning’s top stories on Wednesday, July 29, 2026:
- Federal immigration agents used slurs when they were targeting people during raids in Los Angeles last year, according to recent court records.
- A Southern California contractor is using state incentives to offer free air conditioning to California homeowners. The move is benefiting homeowners and the environment.
- A new report from a court-appointed monitor has found that the U.S Immigration and Customs agency has failed to provide the necessary healthcare at a detention center in the Central Valley.
- A Bay Area congressman is making a nationwide push to develop a national standard for how autonomous vehicles and first-responders coordinate during emergencies.
Federal immigration agents used racial slurs, including “wet” and “tonks,” to identify people to target while sweeping through Los Angeles last year, according to text messages cited in a new court filing asking a federal judge there to bar agents from racial profiling.
Plaintiffs in the Vasquez Perdomo vs. Noem case filed a motion for a preliminary injunction on Monday, arguing that agents had conducted an “ongoing campaign of suspicionless and discriminatory detentive stops” across the Central District of California even after the high-profile street raids of summer 2025 had ceased. As one ICE agent admitted in a deposition, “We’re [still] doing the same thing [as “Operation at Large”] just with a different name.”
The filing includes evidence from months of discovery, including body camera footage and depositions of agents, ordered by U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong after the U.S. Supreme Court stayed an earlier temporary restraining order in the case last September.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is failing to provide adequate healthcare at a new detention center in California City, according to a report from an independent monitor at the facility, where detainees complained of missing medications and months-long delays to cancer treatment.
The findings appear in a report by Dr. Muthusamy Anandkumar, a court-appointed monitor of the California City Immigration Processing Center, which is about 75 miles east of Bakersfield and run by the private prison company CoreCivic. The federal government purchased the facility earlier this month but CoreCivic continues to operate it.
The monitor is part of an ongoing lawsuit the agency is facing from a handful of detained people who allege that the facility is violating their due process rights.
“The facility lacks a reliable system to consistently provide adequate health care, placing individuals at serious risk of both immediate and long-term harm,” Anandkumar wrote. “This pattern indicates broader problems in the facility’s healthcare delivery system rather than occasional lapses in care.”
Following a string of Waymo-fueled traffic meltdowns in the Bay Area, a new federal bill aims to improve coordination between autonomous vehicle companies and emergency responders.
Rep. Kevin Mullin, D-San Mateo, announced Tuesday that his proposed legislation will target autonomous vehicles’ ability to navigate emergency situations spurred by unexpected power outages and other unusual traffic conditions.
“The technology is remarkable in normal conditions; what I’m concerned about is abnormal conditions,” Mullin said. “These vehicles not only need to evolve their technology to deal with that, but they need to be in direct coordination with our local public safety officials whose job it is to respond appropriately.”
Waymo has created a number of headaches for emergency responders in San Francisco — most notably by causing a “traffic meltdown” during the city’s Fourth of July celebrations and grinding to a halt during the city’s December power outages.
Contractor helps homeowners – and the environment – by using state incentives
Maria Franco has lived in the Park Royale Mobile Home Community for 25 years, in the Van Nuys neighborhood in north Los Angeles. The community has just under 150 rectangular homes, lined up neatly on a large field of mostly asphalt, with fruit trees popping up here and there.
Two years ago, Franco faced a string of bad luck. Then her water heater clonked out, so she hauled warm water from her stovetop to her bathroom, scooping it over her head for a shower.
The Southern California summer bore down harshly where she lived in the San Fernando Valley, its temperatures regularly 10 to 15 degrees higher than those on the coast. To cool off, Franco relied on a fan and a partially functional window air conditioning unit.
A knock on her door changed that. A young contractor named Ben Shamoon stood on her step, wanting to know if he could install a new water heater, and an HVAC system that both cooled and heated her home. The cost to Franco? Absolutely nothing.
Shamoon won over customers by canvassing trailer parks. By working with families who lived in close proximity, he could buy in bulk and work more efficiently to complete projects faster. The approach maximized incentives from a state program — aimed at supercharging heat pump adoption — to improve homes at no cost to owners.
He found a climate solution with a lot of wins — for customers, tradespeople and the planet. The approach cracked the nut of one way to bring heat pumps, which run on electricity rather than gas, to low-income Californians.