The deportation force assembled by TrumpleThinskin has reached its logical administrative endpoint: racial slurs are now a formal job qualification.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency published a 47-page guidance memo Tuesday titled "Situational Lexicon for Community Removals." The memo follows an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit that filed 14 audio recordings and 320 pages of text messages. The material appears to show agents using slurs against Latinos during operations in Los Angeles last summer.
ICE spokesperson Dana Ressler said the recordings were taken out of context. "Our personnel use the full range of tools to establish command presence and identify removable individuals," Ressler said. "The language is not bias. It is field shorthand with a 93 percent recognition rate in target neighborhoods."
The guidance describes the terms as "high-context identification markers." It warns that agents who avoid the language may be "overburdening surveillance assets with unnecessary verbal caution." A chart in the memo shows agents who used the terms completed removals 28 percent faster than a control group.
The control group's methodology is not explained. The memo does state that its members were allowed to wear body armor but were not allowed to use regional dialect.
The memo includes a script for agents who encounter citizens demanding to know why a neighbor was taken. It instructs agents to say, "The subject matched a community descriptor." The script does not define community. A sidebar reads, "Contextual awareness is not derivative of residence."
The agency also introduced a "Linguistic Readiness" badge for employees who show proficiency in at least three slurs. The badge will not appear on uniforms. It will be noted in promotion files.
An ICE training coordinator, speaking at a Tuesday webinar, said the badge was not about hate. "If an agent cannot use the local term, he is not fluent in the operational environment," the coordinator said. "We would never send an officer into a financial crimes unit who cannot say wire fraud."
The agency's budget request for the next fiscal year includes $2.4 million for a dialect immersion lab at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. The lab will feature simulated bus stops and convenience store parking lots. Trainees will practice shouting from moving vans.
This is not language. It is a federal agency converting a hate crime into a timesheet category.
The memo's closing section lists examples of acceptable professional development. One example is a recorded shout aimed at a U.S. citizen outside a Houston airport. It is labeled "high-functioning command presence." A second example, described as "redundant but acceptable," is the same shout directed at a 75-year-old Republican donor who later told reporters he would not vote again after this fiasco.
