BREAKING: Trump's Raid on Gavin Newsom EXPOSED as Politically Motivated
DHS spent months telling the public that its immigration enforcement in Los Angeles was strictly about the law. No politics. No targeting of Governor Gavin Newsom. Just agents doing their jobs.
Newly unsealed court documents show what the agents doing that job were actually texting each other in real time. And the language they used was blunt: “political,” “stunt,” “just a political agenda.”
What the Documents Show
Hundreds of court exhibits filed as part of a motion for a preliminary injunction by the ACLU, Public Counsel, and other groups and attorneys reveal the inside operations of federal immigration enforcement in Los Angeles, exposing what the Los Angeles Times described as a chaotic mix of random street stops, casual racial slurs, and agents privately worried they were being ordered to break the law.
The lawsuit is seeking to bar what it describes as an “ongoing campaign of suspicionless and discriminatory detentive stops” in the Central District of California.
The Text Messages About Newsom
On August 14, 2025, a phalanx of Border Patrol agents showed up outside a news conference held by leading California Democrats, including Governor Newsom. A Homeland Security Investigations agent texted a colleague afterward describing the operation in blunt terms: “political” and “a stunt.”
A Homeland Security spokesperson claimed at the time that agents were “focused on enforcing the law, not on [Newsom].” The agent’s own text messages describe the same operation differently, saying Border Patrol had “essentially raided the Newsom press conferences.”
“We got pulled off the Home Depot and car wash to run this stunt,” the agent wrote. “We’re told to assist with targeted enforcement... That is not target enforcement. That was just a political agenda. Hopefully I can get replaced soon.”
How Newsom’s Office Responded
Newsom’s office told the Daily Beast the timing of the operation was “no coincidence.”
“The timing and purpose described by the personnel raise profound questions about whether federal law enforcement was used to shape a political narrative at the height of an election-season debate,” the statement read. “These newly released court records directly contradict repeated public claims from the Trump administration that the immigration raid was unrelated to Governor Newsom.”
The agent’s own words back that up. He is not speculating about political motivation from the outside. He is describing, from inside the operation, an assignment he believed had no legitimate law enforcement basis.
How the Raid Sites Were Chosen
The documents also reveal how loosely some enforcement decisions were made in the first place.
A Border Patrol agent testified about how officers picked the site of a June 18 raid at a car wash in Whittier. According to the agent, the team simply searched Google for nearby car washes, and picked the Whittier location because it was the nearest one that came up on the list.
That is the level of operational planning behind at least one immigration raid in a major American city: a Google search for the closest car wash.
Slurs and Casual Language in the Field
The filing also includes body camera footage and text messages capturing how some agents talked about the people they were detaining.
In one June 2025 exchange, an agent noted that streets in Huntington Park “were packed with possibles.” After a separate operation resulted in 31 apprehensions in a single day, one agent responded: “Damn good s--t fellas.” Texts and footage also captured agents using the slur “wet,” derived from a well-known ethnic slur, and “tonk,” a term the ACLU says refers to the sound of a flashlight striking a migrant’s head.
Asked about the slurs, a DHS spokesperson responded: “agents are focused on protecting the American people, not entertaining performative outrage. Where is the media’s outrage for Angel families who lost a loved one to illegal alien crime?”
The spokesperson did not deny the slurs were used.
Agents Worried They Were Violating a Court Order
Perhaps the most serious revelation in the filing: agents believed, in real time, that their own operations were breaking the law.
The same text thread that captured the “stunt” comment also showed two Homeland Security Investigations agents privately worrying that operations were violating a federal court order. A judge had issued a temporary restraining order the month before, blocking agents from using racial profiling for indiscriminate arrests in Southern California, specifically intended to stop agents from targeting Home Depots and car washes to detain Spanish-speaking day laborers.
“I complained about the Home Depot stuff saying I think it violates the TRO,” one agent wrote. “Yeah I’m pretty sure it does,” a colleague responded, adding that she doubted the agency would meaningfully change its tactics. “I think they only know one way to operate,” she wrote. “See bodies, chase bodies.”
An Agent Who Wanted Off the Assignment
In his deposition, the male agent whose texts are quoted throughout the filing said the operations grew progressively less targeted over time, culminating in the news conference operation, which he said had no targets at all.
“They marched to a democratic governor’s press conference. It seemed to be purely political,” he testified. “It did not seem like there was a good operational basis to be doing that.”
Having worked in immigration enforcement since 2008, he described the overall aggression of the 2025 Los Angeles raids as “a little intense for like a large city,” and said the news conference operation was the final straw that made him want off the assignment entirely.
This is not an activist’s account. It is sworn deposition testimony from a career federal immigration agent.
The Bottom Line
DHS spent months insisting its Los Angeles operations were about law enforcement, not politics, and specifically denied targeting Gavin Newsom. Its own agents’ text messages, turned over in federal court, describe an operation outside a Newsom press conference as a “political stunt” that pulled them off legitimate assignments. Those same agents privately worried their broader tactics were violating a federal court order.
DHS has not denied any of it. It has responded by attacking the reporters and dismissing concerns about documented slurs as “performative outrage.”
The court records speak for themselves. And they contradict, in the agents’ own words, what the administration has been telling the public for months.