Since immigration agents began carrying out a string of big, aggressive sweeps last year, civil rights groups have argued that the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign has been defined by brazen racial profiling. In an emailed statement, Katherine Currie, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, did not respond to questions about agents using slurs. She called allegations that federal officers were engaged in racial profiling "disgusting, reckless, and categorically false." Federal law has granted immigration officers far more latitude at immigration checkpoints and within a 100-mile radius of any of the nation's borders. The slur has been used since at least the 1990s by immigration officers along the nation's southern border.