This article by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone is worth your time if only because the discourse reveals the degree of dehumanizing oppression that has been institutionalized in CBP. Considering the 100 mile enforcement zone, the lexicon is worth noting.
The text exchanges between matthew Bowen and fellow agents — entered into the court record by the defense, which seeks to exclude them at trial — suggest a work environment in which demeaning epithets, ranging from “guat” to “fucking beaners,” are common, and in which violence against undocumented border crossers is treated as a joke.
Throughout the texts, illegal border crossers are referred to as “tonks.” A federal court case from 2004, which also centered on accusations of excessive force by the Border Patrol, includes an agent’s definition of “tonk” as “the sound heard when a ‘wetback’ is hit over the head with a flashlight.” Josiah Heyman is the chair of the anthropology department at the University of Texas, El Paso. In research on the border, he’s heard Border Patrol agents use the term “tonk” since the early 1990s. “That’s their position in the hierarchy,” he says of undocumented migrants in relation to Border Patrol agents. “They’re hittable people.”
(Some defenders of the Border Patrol have suggested TONK is merely an acronym meaning “Territory of Origin Not Known,” or perhaps, in an alternate spelling, TONC, meaning “Temporarily Outside Native Country.” Heyman calls such alternate definitions “manipulative,” insisting the word “was described to me explicitly as the sound of someone being hit — by agents themselves.”)
tonk (plural tonks)
Noun
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(slang, chiefly US) An illegal immigrant of any country.
Origins are unknown, but definitely predate the use of metal flashlights, contrary to the most quoted description of origin.
It is probable that the origin relates to Chinese immigration, as the first law to restrict immigration from a particular country was enacted in 1882 to limit the numbers of Chinese coming to the United States. It is said that many of the illegal immigrants made their way to the US via the Gulf of Tonkin area of what is now Vietnam. It is also possible that the term is related to the Chinese "tong" mob.
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en.wiktionary.org/...