Ethics complaint accuses Texas judge of racist slur about illegal immigrant defendants

A Texas judge who regularly handles cases against illegal immigrants has been accused of using a racist slur to refer to those defendants.

Judge Edgar Allen Amos allegedly said that the Latino defendants are not “your regular wetbacks,” according to a July complaint filed by defense attorney Emily Miller to Texas’ Commission on Judicial Conduct. The complaint was first obtained and reported on by the Daily Beast earlier this week.

Ms. Miller said that Mr. Amos used the slur in conversation with her and that Mr. Amos went on to say that the illegal immigrants “have phones and clothes and all kinds of other things.”

She took that to mean that Mr. Amos believes the migrants aren’t poor or needy. Ms. Miller believed that both comments invite scrutiny about Mr. Amos’ impartiality in the cases he presides over.

“I have had several indigent clients of Guatemalan, Honduran, and Mexican descent whose bonds have recently been revoked by Judge Amos, and his presumed bias against my clients by calling them ‘wetbacks’ and mentioning their supposed affluence leads me to question whether he made an unbiased decision in their hearings,” she wrote in her complaint.

Mr. Amos came out of retirement to serve as a judge for Kinney County, which borders Mexico in the western part of the state. 

The judge mostly presides over trespassing cases that have been brought against illegal immigrants as a part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s initiative Operation Lone Star, according to the Texas Tribune.

Operation Lone Star deployed 10,000 of the state’s Department of Public Safety officers and National Guard soldiers for the stated purpose of stopping illegal drug and human trafficking at the border. 

Since its inception in March 2021, the Daily Beast reported that roughly half of Operation Lone Star’s 7,200 arrests have been on trespassing charges. 

In May, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into Operation Lone Star to see if it complied with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 

The DOJ is seeking to determine if authorities are “discriminating on the basis of race and/or national origin in its activities related to Operation Lone Star by targeting certain individuals for arrests for misdemeanor trespass violations and traffic stops based on their perceived or actual race or national origin,” a letter obtained by ABC News said.