The Small-Town Cop Who Helped ICE Deport His Ingram, Texas, Neighbors — ProPublica

The new patrol officer parked his black Dodge Charger outdoors a home off Main Street and approached on foot. A Mexican ballad was taking part in. Someone had referred to as in a noise criticism, claiming it sounded as if individuals had been preventing.

But because the officer, Jaron Alexander, bought nearer, he discovered nothing of the type. A middle-aged lady greeted him as her daughter, Joanna Martinez, petite and visibly pregnant, appeared on. “What kind of party are you all having?” she remembers him asking. Behind her had been three generations of an prolonged household. They had been celebrating a 3-month-old’s baptism over pozole verde, horchata and beers.

Alexander ran some IDs and located no points. The music wasn’t even that loud, he thought. He instructed them to have a superb evening, after which he left.

That encounter, in early October final yr, was the primary of many who Alexander and Martinez would have in tiny Ingram, Texas, a 1.5-square-mile city of 1,900 individuals beside the Guadalupe River. But it was the one one earlier than Ingram signed an settlement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that may roil the city and tear Martinez’s household aside.

“Her and I, at the beginning, I felt like we were running into each other all the time,” Alexander instructed us, in one in every of eight conversations over 4 months that provide a uncommon window into the ideas of one of many native law enforcement officials on the entrance strains of the Trump administration’s deportation marketing campaign.

In a city as small as Ingram, drivable in 5 minutes finish to finish, extra run-ins had been most likely inevitable. Later that October, Alexander pulled over a piece truck for rolling by way of a cease signal, and shortly there Martinez was, demanding that he let her buddies go reasonably than let immigration take them. He didn’t. He pulled over one other driver in November who turned out to be her cousin, the daddy of the newborn they celebrated on the baptism celebration. Alexander handed him over to immigration brokers as nicely.

He pulled over Martinez herself a couple of weeks earlier than she was as a result of give delivery, she says, shocking her when he knew her identify and the kind of automobile she sometimes drove. He warned her that the automobile’s window tint was unlawful and let her go. After that, he says, he caught a glimpse of her and her husband and their new child daughter within the toy aisle at Walmart. Martinez instructed us she doesn’t assume it was even her that day — her child woman was then simply days outdated, and she or he couldn’t think about operating errands together with her so quickly. But in Alexander’s reminiscence, she was looking for Christmas presents, similar to him.

Alexander, who’s in his mid-30s, with soiled blond hair already turning grey, says he didn’t come again to Ingram to assist deport his neighbors. In his telling, he simply ended up making it a part of his job. The city was the place he began his law-enforcement profession years earlier, earlier than he took a better-paying place with the county, as a sheriff’s deputy. But issues lately began to collapse, first in his marriage, subsequent on the sheriff’s workplace: A 185-page inside investigation discovered that he had an affair earlier than his divorce was ultimate and used a county car to hold it out, then lied about all of it. He says the investigator referred to as him an “embarrassment to the profession.” The sheriff’s workplace fired him. (Alexander stated on the time, and once more to us, that he didn’t have the affair.)

Ingram’s Police Department took him again simply when its new chief — its eighth in 5 years — was below strain from the City Council to do extra: extra site visitors stops, extra citations, extra arrests, extra numbers. Alexander says he instructed the chief that the sheriff’s workplace had a cope with ICE and that Ingram ought to look into it; possibly it may assist the division develop. “Blame me,” he finally instructed individuals. “It’s my fault in a way.”

Donald Trump had retaken the presidency with a promise to hold out “the largest deportation in the history of our country.” America was nonetheless determining what that meant. Finding and expelling as much as 4% of the U.S. inhabitants — the 14 million residents who’re estimated to be undocumented — wasn’t one thing a couple of thousand ICE brokers may do on their very own.

Underway in Chicago that fall, and shortly in Minneapolis, was one model of how the administration may attempt to do it: masked brokers from throughout the federal authorities surging right into a liberal metropolis to spherical up immigrants, beating again — even killing — the residents who tried to face of their path.

But a quieter form of surge was spreading throughout the nation on the similar time. In September 2025, ICE introduced new incentives for a partnership program often known as 287(g). The program’s most aggressive kind, the so-called task force model, which Ingram opted in to, enlists native law enforcement officials as deputy immigration brokers, and the brand new incentives included a $100,000 car stipend, a $7,500 gear stipend for each taking part officer, quarterly efficiency bonuses and funding to assist cowl officer salaries and extra time. “By joining forces with ICE,” the announcement learn, “you’re not just gaining access to these unprecedented reimbursement opportunities — you’re becoming part of a national effort to ensure the safety of every American family.”

Alexander accomplished a web based course with ICE a couple of weeks after the baptism celebration, qualifying him for time-and-a-half pay each time he helped the company decide up immigrants. Here within the Texas Hill Country, he quickly turned the native face of the nationwide crackdown.

Ingram was simply beginning to get well from its worst pure catastrophe in a century, the flood that summer time that killed a minimum of 139 individuals up and down the Guadalupe River, together with 25 ladies at Camp Mystic. In the riverbed, towering bald cypress timber now stood at a lean, their branches swept again by a 30-foot surge of water and dust, their trunks nonetheless plastered with particles. As development staff rebuilding the group traveled to their jobsites by way of Junction Highway, Ingram’s five-lane major thoroughfare, a black Charger started stopping them earlier than they may get there.

Within three months of the baptism celebration, Alexander and Ingram’s different patrol officer had delivered a minimum of 70 individuals to immigration brokers, choosing off what the police chief referred to as a “dumbfounding” variety of undocumented drivers. Within a yr, they’d hand over the equal of 10% of Ingram to ICE.

The weight of what Alexander was doing began to decide on him after Christmas. He says he was out patrolling as one in every of his new ICE handlers, a person in a ball cap and darkish glasses, hovered close by in an unmarked SUV. Around lunchtime, Alexander adopted two Latino males in a 2008 GMC truck for a number of blocks earlier than stopping them, they recall him saying, for failing to sign a flip.

A younger man sat within the passenger seat. Alexander checked his papers together with the motive force’s and decided that each had been undocumented. The agent within the unmarked SUV rolled up behind them. Alexander realized who the person within the passenger seat was solely after Martinez arrived in tears. It was her husband, Ulices Macias, the daddy of her new child daughter. 

“I don’t normally do this,” Martinez remembers Alexander telling her, “but I’m going to open up the car. I’m going to take the handcuffs off him.” He let the household have a second collectively. In a video taken by Martinez’s youthful sister, Alexander stood by, expressionless, as Martinez embraced Macias by the rear door of the Charger. He watched Macias cradle his 2-week-old child woman, swaddled in a white blanket, and hug Martinez’s 4-year-old son, his stepson.

Then the ICE agent put {the handcuffs} again on Martinez’s husband, wrapped a series round his waist and led him away. Alexander says Martinez threw herself to the bottom and sobbed.

Images of the household he broke up shortly after Christmas would intrude on Alexander’s ideas for months, he instructed us. But it didn’t maintain him from doing his job. His subsequent shift got here a couple of days after he handed over Macias, and he was again within the Charger, again to stopping vehicles on Junction Highway.

“Mini Guanajuato”

Alexander says he didn’t at all times need to be a police officer. He describes himself as “kind of a chameleon.” He grew up in close by Harper, tried a couple of completely different faculties with out graduating and spent his 20s biking although jobs in freight logistics, pest management and insurance coverage.

Still looking for his calling, he organized a ride-along with a police officer outdoors Austin. What bought him on policing was the suburban officer’s energy to implement the legislation as he noticed match. That day, they pulled over a lady who had a warrant out for her arrest. She was getting back from the shop with kids and groceries within the again seat.

“You can use your discretion,” Alexander remembers the officer telling him. Wouldn’t they be doing extra hurt in the event that they took her? What would the youngsters do with out their mom? And wouldn’t all of it create extra paperwork? The officer let her go. Alexander imagined himself making the identical sorts of judgment calls. In 2021, he enrolled within the police academy.

Even earlier than the floods, tensions had been rising in Ingram. Hundreds of Mexican immigrants and their households had settled there in latest many years as an more and more militarized border made it more durable for seasonal ranch palms and different staff to cross forwards and backwards. Latinos would come to make up 45% of its inhabitants, and a few residents started affectionately calling Ingram “mini Guanajuato,” after the central Mexican state the place many have roots. Yet when Alexander returned, Ingram’s City Council nonetheless consisted of six white males.

A council faction led by Claud Jordan, now the city’s mayor, and Rocky Hawkins, now the mayor professional tem, got here to energy in November 2020, in a revolt in opposition to a brand new sewer challenge. They abolished Ingram’s metropolis administrator place and took direct management of the Police Department, biking by way of chief after chief. Five former metropolis workers say Hawkins usually used racist slurs for Mexicans. Four say that he pressured the town to go after Latinos by way of code enforcement or focused patrols, and two say that Jordan did, too. One of the staff remembers Hawkins complaining that Mexicans had been “taking over Ingram.” (Hawkins and Jordan every declined to talk on the file or handle detailed questions we despatched them by e mail. In a short text-message change, Hawkins stated that none of it was proper however declined to supply any particular considerations.)

These had been the boys the brand new chief, Dustin Breshears, needed to reply to as ICE revived the duty power program, which had been shut down for a dozen years till the day Trump returned to workplace in January 2025. ICE, below President Barack Obama, had phased out this system after a few of the first sheriffs to take part in it, together with Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, used it to disproportionately target Latinos of their communities. Investigations by the Department of Justice discovered that deputies within the activity power program pulled over Latino drivers at as much as 9 instances the speed of different drivers and that some retaliated violently in opposition to individuals who accused them of racial profiling. But now, below Trump, any law-enforcement company, regardless of how troubled or small, was inspired to enroll.

Breshears started showing at City Council conferences armed with statistics: variety of arrests for the reason that final assembly, variety of site visitors stops, variety of cleared circumstances from the backlog of lots of he inherited — and variety of what he referred to as “deportations.” (He later defined this was his imprecise shorthand for “immigration-related enforcement activities.”) At the council’s October 2025 assembly, held a few weeks after Alexander confirmed up on the Martinez household’s baptism celebration, Breshears reported a exceptional 162 site visitors stops by Ingram’s two patrol officers — Alexander and Christian Perez, who was 25 — in simply 20 days. (Perez declined to remark.) The officers made extra stops in two months than the division had made in your entire earlier yr. The City Council gave Breshears an $18,000 increase.

Before Breshears arrived and Alexander returned in August 2025, the weekly blotter in The West Kerr Current, the native newspaper, documented the humdrum of group policing: free canine, neighborhood disputes, code violations. Then, all of the sudden, it was full of drivers stopped for faulty brake lights, broken license plates, cracked windshields, unlawful window tints or different unspecified “equipment violations.”

Breshears and Alexander strongly deny focusing on Latinos. “It’s honestly not what’s happening,” Breshears says, noting that his half brother, spouse and daughters have Mexican heritage. Ingram’s site visitors stops had been merely up throughout the board, he says, so extra Latinos had been getting stopped. He shared statistics displaying that stops of Latinos had been proportional to their share of the inhabitants.

Alexander, who on high of his roughly $70,000 base wage was now logging dozens of hours per 30 days for ICE, instructed us the identical. “I don’t care who’s in the car,” he says. “I really don’t.”

“El Charger Negro”

As the ICE program took maintain in Ingram, warnings about Alexander and his black Charger — the division has a number of — unfold by way of the Hill Country and much past. Groups on Facebook and WhatsApp appeared to trace his each transfer. The Charger was outdoors Rita’s taco store. The Charger was close to Dollar General. The Charger was parked by the church. A member of 1 notably lively Facebook group texted him screenshots, and he scrolled by way of blurry pictures of himself looming behind work vehicles or leaning over automobile home windows.

Many Latino motorists attempting to succeed in worksites up the Guadalupe started driving an additional 90 minutes every day to keep away from the part of Junction Highway that Alexander patrolled. Ranch palms started sleeping at their employers’ properties in close by Hunt, coming to city solely once they knew — or hoped — that Ingram’s officers could be off responsibility. Residents had been rattled the day a Customs and Border Protection helicopter hovered above city and the elementary college went into lockdown because the police hunted for a Mexican man who had run from one in every of Alexander’s site visitors stops.

One household notarized guardianship papers, in case the mother and father had been detained and the kids left behind. One lady swore Alexander confirmed up outdoors a memorial service and requested individuals for IDs. Another lady stated he detained her and her husband once they returned dwelling from church. Parties dwindled. Invite lists shrank. People started to maneuver away, to Kerrville and San Antonio, and Alexander’s repute reached so far as La Ceja, a village within the mountains of central Mexico, the place an aged resident stated he and his neighbors had been conversant in the Texas city’s police. “El Charger negro,” he stated, with a figuring out nod. He estimated that some 20 or 30 individuals within the village had been latest deportees from Ingram.

Alexander’s fortunes appeared to rise because the Martinez household’s fell. With her husband gone, Joanna Martinez couldn’t afford funds on the trailer they shared. She and their toddler and her 4-year-old son moved again into her childhood bed room in her mom’s crowded dwelling, the place a number of family members and their kids additionally lived. She tried to remain related together with her husband, Macias, by way of WhatsApp calls whereas working as a lot as she may as a home cleaner to maintain afloat. “I can’t lock myself up in my room and just cry,” Martinez says.

Winter for Martinez and her household introduced a string of darkish incidents. The January arrest of her cousin close to the carwash as she drove to select up her kids from college. A canceled child bathe for her older sister, Jazmin, over a rumor that the Charger deliberate to point out up. Another cousin, himself the daddy of a new child, stopped and brought proper in entrance of her mom’s home as Martinez watched.

A half dozen of the attendees from the October baptism celebration would quickly be gone from Ingram, after being detained and deported or leaving to affix family members who had been. Some individuals had gotten wind that Alexander was being profitable off his enforcement. When a Spanish-language Facebook web page shared a photograph of him questioning the passenger of a beige Ford pickup, somebody posted an animated picture within the feedback: a stack of inexperienced greenback payments rising taller and taller in an infinite loop.

Alexander obtained his first ICE funds in early December. In January, because the nation’s consideration turned to the violent immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, he was usually spending three or 4 hours a day and typically total shifts engaged on behalf of the federal company. By the time federal authorities introduced a drawdown in Minneapolis on Feb. 12, Alexander had already made $3,264.46 from his activity power hours, in keeping with his pay stubs.

Ingram was by then one in every of greater than 750 activity power mannequin companions across the nation, up from not fairly 500 when it signed up in October. At least 43 million U.S. residents, in keeping with an evaluation of ICE data by the authorized knowledge agency Titus Consulting, already lived in a county with an lively activity power settlement. Alexander was one in every of 1000’s of deputized officers in Texas alone.

In interviews, Alexander described the immigration system he was implementing as “skewed” and “weird,” however he noticed himself as largely separate from these considerations. “If you’re taking federal money to do a job,” he says, “I think you should do the job.”

Still, he appeared to wrestle with the contradictions of his function. He instructed us he typically shared his lunch with the individuals he detained and that he allow them to maintain on to their telephones to name family members from the rear seat of the Charger. He handcuffed them with their palms within the entrance reasonably than the again so they may use their palms.

Martinez instructed us a couple of second when she watched him detain one in every of her cousins. He allowed the person’s spouse and youngsters to hug him goodbye and waited till his 7-year-old daughter wasn’t trying to handcuff him. To Martinez, it appeared as if Alexander was attempting to show to her that he wasn’t a foul individual. “But I’m not going to fall for it,” she says.

There was a protest in Ingram the next day in opposition to Trump’s mass deportations. Martinez determined to go. As she stood amongst a couple of dozen protesters waving a home made signal with the identify “J. Alexander” circled and crossed out, she noticed him drive by time and again.

A couple of weeks later, Katie Winer, the chief of the group that staged the protest, was following the Charger after Alexander detained one other immigrant in a site visitors cease. He approached her automobile and threatened to arrest her if she adopted him sooner or later, on fees of interfering with public duties. But he additionally appeared to need to speak, and she or he recorded him as they mentioned what was happening in Ingram. “I think you guys are making a bigger deal of it than they are,” he stated of the individuals he handed over to ICE. The solely outliers had been “loudmouths” like Martinez and “her little crew.”

Winer interjected that Martinez’s husband was the household’s breadwinner, and it was Alexander’s actions that tore them aside.

“My actions did not,” Alexander stated. “His actions did. I made a traffic stop. He was here illegally. That’s not my fault.”

Still, Alexander’s uncertainty gave the impression to be rising. In March, one other of Martinez’s cousins confronted him outdoors the taco store, urgent him about Macias as she filmed together with her cellphone.

“If I’m being 100% honest,” he stated, “I don’t enjoy when families are separated, like with the Joanna situation. That kind of fucked me up.”

“I Voted to Get the Bad Guys Out”

A month later, as Ingram’s handoffs to ICE surpassed 100 individuals, one other video of Alexander circulated amongst a small group of group members. It confirmed a night site visitors cease, a minimum of the fifth cease Alexander made that day. He had adopted a silver Ford F-250 from the freeway till it pulled into the gravel driveway of a cell dwelling. There, the person within the passenger seat, a landscaper named Victor Ramirez Hernandez, tried to rush inside. Alexander grabbed him earlier than he may get there.

The truck’s driver pulled out his cellphone and started filming. “Why are you arresting him?” he requested.

“I’m not,” Alexander answered, struggling to position handcuffs on Ramirez as he squirmed. “I’m detaining him.” Then he wrapped his palms across the laborer’s chest, lifted him off the bottom and slammed him down on the driveway. “I played nice with you, and now I’m done,” he stated. He straddled Ramirez and cuffed his palms behind his again.

“He’s bleeding because you hit him,” the motive force stated evenly. They argued forwards and backwards.

“You’re an idiot,” Alexander stated, his face reddening. “Shut up. The more you talk it’s just making you look stupider.” (Alexander declined to touch upon this incident. Breshears, who reviewed body-camera footage, says Alexander’s use of power was justified to regulate a doubtlessly harmful state of affairs.)

Acrimony pulsed by way of Ingram that spring. In the Latino group, members of the family and neighbors accused each other of snitching, which Alexander says did occur. Young girls accused each other of getting affairs with him, which he denies, insisting that folks simply misinterpreted his makes an attempt to be form. “I’m friendly with the people that I meet,” he says, “especially when they’re friendly to me.”

One topic of those rumors was Martinez. She and her older sister scoffed at them. “He’s taken our whole family at this point,” Jazmin says. “And she’s going to sleep with him? It’s really annoying.” But some locally, even cousins, stopped talking together with her. “It’s like ‘Hunger Games,’” Martinez says.

As Latinos fled and averted Ingram, the each day takeout orders at one Mexican restaurant on the sting of city dropped to 50 from 200. A nook retailer catering to immigrants misplaced round half its income and most of its Latino regulars. Landlords in a mobile-home park simply outdoors city struggled to seek out tenants.

But it wasn’t simply Ingram’s Latino group that was reeling. For Ingram’s non-Hispanic enterprise house owners, together with many Republicans in a county that voted 77% for Trump within the 2024 election, the immigration crackdown was turning into an outrage. It was taking individuals they labored with and knew nicely. It was interfering with flood reconstruction. It was hurting the native economic system.

The proprietor of a closely broken strip mall on the western fringe of city, Steve Edelstein, lamented the lack of two staff who had been serving to him rebuild. “Technically local law enforcement is doing their job,” he instructed a reporter for The West Kerr Current, emphasizing that he supported Trump. “But it isn’t helping the community.” A supervisor overseeing the rebuilding of Ingram’s Little League subject, which was washed away within the flood, made an offended name to the town after two of his staff had been picked up, Breshears says. A contractor serving to rebuild Hunt’s destroyed submit workplace had his crew diminished to eight staff from 30 — inflicting what ought to have been a four-day job to stretch to 2 weeks.

Among the individuals who referred to as Jordan, the mayor, to complain was his onetime highschool classmate Neal Secor, who describes himself as “one of the most conservative guys you’ll ever meet.” His household enterprise, a cluster of rental cabins referred to as Waltonia on the River, was almost destroyed by the flood. He was struggling to rebuild. He says that within the spring, in two separate stops, the Ingram police detained 4 of his staff and handed them over to ICE — the second set as they returned from a job repairing the docks at a close-by youth camp, a favor Secor was attempting to do for a neighbor.

Secor says Jordan’s protection was easy: You voted for this. They’d all voted for this.

“Let me tell you something,” Secor says he instructed Jordan. “I didn’t vote for this. I voted to get the bad guys out.” The two workers detained getting back from the youth camp had been like household, his buddies and associates for over a decade. “There’s still a lot of bad guys here,” he continued. “These guys aren’t them.”

Secor remembers Jordan saying that Ingram’s officers had been simply following the legislation. But, Secor puzzled, why was it that he may drive 85 day by day on the 75-mile-an-hour interstate and law enforcement officials simply let him move? He instructed Jordan he’d put 175,000 miles on his truck and by no means been pulled over. “It’s a matter of what laws you want to pick and choose,” he remembers telling the mayor. “We all break laws every day if you really want to get down to it.”

“God Wanted Me to Meet You”

On an unpaved facet road within the Ingram hills in April, Alexander once more confronted a call over whether or not to separate a younger household. This time he had extra of a alternative; ICE had but to reach. A lady named Norma Luján took his hand and stated she was praying for him.

Luján, 61, runs a profitable housecleaning firm primarily based in Ingram. She had heard of Alexander lengthy earlier than she confronted him. She had seen him within the Charger, too: on the facet of Junction Highway as she made her option to jobs at trip houses or youth camps up in Hunt. On the facet of the freeway on the way in which again. In her rearview mirror for 4 excruciating minutes one afternoon as her “girls,” as she referred to as her crew, held their breath and sank into their seats, protected by the tint of her automobile’s home windows and the truth that a license-plate reader would present it was registered to her, a Texas-born U.S. citizen.

In January, on the carwash, Alexander had helped a sheriff’s deputy take one in every of Luján’s finest workers into custody. The lady, Cinthya Carranza, was a single mom and asylum seeker from Guanajuato — and Joanna Martinez’s cousin. Carranza was on her option to get her kids from college after she and Luján spent the day cleansing homes. Later that day, Luján noticed a Facebook submit displaying a well-recognized face in a mug shot: Carranza’s. Luján broke into tears. To her, the arrest was a sign occasion. The Charger had principally stopped males as much as that time. This was the second she understood that nobody was secure.

Luján began shedding staff in droves after Carranza was taken — some to site visitors stops, most for concern of getting to drive by way of Ingram. Her crew of 30 individuals dropped to fewer than 10. She nervous for her enterprise, however she nervous extra, she stated, for her staff, the lives that they had made in Ingram and the relationships she had constructed with them. They invited her to events and baptisms, stunned her with presents on her birthday. She usually led them in prayer. “I love them,” she says. She promised she would attempt to defend them.

When Luján’s worker Maria referred to as that April afternoon to say the officer within the Charger was outdoors her home, detaining her husband as he returned from work, Luján jumped into motion. Maria (who requested to be recognized by her center identify as a result of she is undocumented) was eight months pregnant and already terrified that she must give delivery alone. Alexander had taken her brother per week earlier. Now Maria was hiding behind the curtains of her dwelling, sneaking peeks outdoors, hoping Alexander would let her husband go.

“Cálmate” — relax — Luján instructed herself as she approached the Charger. “Cálmate.” She took a deep breath. She says Alexander was sitting within the driver’s seat with the door propped open, observing a pill laptop.

“Look, his wife has had a complicated pregnancy,” she instructed him. (This was true.) “She’s in the hospital.” (For that lie, Luján says, she later prayed for forgiveness.)

Then Luján reached out and grabbed Alexander’s hand. “I pray for your being, for your soul,” she remembers telling him as she cried. “I want you to think about what you’re doing. Feel it. Feel it, please.” She squeezed his hand. “I need you to look inside your heart,” she continued, “and let him go.”

Alexander didn’t react at first, in Luján’s telling. “God wanted me to meet you,” she stated. He met her gaze.

“I’m that guy that everyone talks about on Facebook,” she remembers him lastly saying. “If you think I don’t lose any sleep, you’re wrong.”

Luján pushed by way of the lump in her throat to talk. “I’m going to pray for you every night,” she promised him. She says Alexander squeezed her hand again, then pulled away. He walked off to make a name. She couldn’t make out a lot of what he stated. It was quiet, save for the sound of Luján’s sobs and the pebbles from the unpaved street crunching beneath the officer’s ft.

Then he returned to the Charger. “Get him out of the car,” Luján remembers him saying. “Hurry up.”

“God bless you,” Luján stated. “God will repay you for this.”

Alexander says he doesn’t keep in mind the main points of his interplay with Luján, however he confirms that he let Maria’s husband go, calling it a matter of “human decency.” He knew how laborious it was to boost kids. “A woman needs rest,” he says. “She needs help.” Maria’s husband “needs to be there helping out.”

At first, nothing appeared to vary. Over the following two months, because the Hill Country ready to welcome summer time vacationers and campers again after the devastation of the floods, Alexander labored round 100 activity power hours, incomes near $5,000 from ICE.

But the following time he bumped into Joanna Martinez, he gave the impression to be having misgivings. It was early June, and he was eight months into the ICE program. He had pulled over one other of her household buddies on Junction Highway, an individual she had recognized since childhood. Martinez bought a cellphone name and rushed to the scene, as she had so many instances earlier than. “I don’t feel good about this,” she remembers him saying when she arrived. “I signed up to be a cop, not an ICE agent.” (Alexander says he remembers that they talked and that he may have stated one thing like that.)

Later that month, he pulled over a younger man from Honduras who was on his option to a soccer sport together with his cousin, a 12-year-old with developmental disabilities. The boy’s father says he and his spouse hid throughout the road watching all of it occur, too terrified to step out and declare their son. The mother and father despatched a buddy from church, however she was not a authorized guardian. Alexander says he had no alternative however handy the boy over to ICE, including although that if he was one of many mother and father, he would see it otherwise. “If I’m in that position, there’s no way I’m letting my kid go,” he instructed us. “I’m probably fighting someone.”

Within a few weeks, Alexander’s activity power hours dropped by about 40%, in keeping with his pay stubs. It stays unclear if he tried to step again from immigration work or whether or not the variety of undocumented drivers in Ingram had merely dwindled due to all he had already completed.

According to Chief Breshears, Ingram had logged 194 “immigration-related incidents” as of this August. Whether each handover led to a deportation, Breshears couldn’t say. Alexander says he doesn’t know the way lots of the 194 are individuals he stopped. But he says he has now let a minimum of 10 individuals go — many, although not all of them, moms of younger kids.

Alexander sees this, and his relationship to the Martinez household, as proof of his humanity, regardless of what individuals say about him. “For context, I’ve deported like six of their family members, and they’re still friendly to me,” he says. “So I’m not the monster they make me out to be.”

On July 16, the skies over Ingram opened once more, dropping almost 19 inches of rain in a single day, and the Guadalupe once more overtopped its banks, once more destroying companies and houses. In the predawn darkness within the early hours of the emergency, Alexander started racing towards Ingram in his black Charger to assist. He had barely left his home when surging floodwaters consumed the car, destroying the Charger’s engine block. A driver in a pickup truck took him again dwelling, and that’s the place he stayed till the storm receded.

“One Free Pass”

Alexander stays just one cog in a deportation machine for which the federal authorities has now earmarked $240 billion. Today greater than 1,900 companies in a minimum of 30 states have signed up for ICE’s activity power mannequin, with greater than 29,000 deputized officers. With their assist, ICE lately hit a file of immigration arrests, totaling greater than 50,000 in August.

On Sept. 11, Alexander met one in every of us at a taco spot on Junction Highway. Ingram had modified within the yr since his return. Whole neighborhoods had emptied out, and residents observed fewer drivers on the streets. In half due to the cash from ICE, the Police Department had employed two further officers. As a Mexican ballad performed over the audio system, Alexander warned in opposition to making an excessive amount of of the leniency he confirmed to households like Maria’s. “It’s like one free pass, I guess,” he stated: If he encountered her husband once more throughout a site visitors cease, he would most likely hand him over to ICE. He simply thought letting the father-to-be go was the best name on the time. “I mean, don’t you?” he requested.

He stated he hadn’t made all that a lot cash working with ICE. But metropolis data present that his earnings from the company already totaled $18,793.25 in 9 months, greater than 1 / 4 of his base wage. “I think it’s skewed a little bit,” he stated, wanting on the pay stubs we had gathered.

Alexander stated it was laborious for him to be out in public anymore. He can’t escape being acknowledged in Ingram and Kerrville. Sometimes he catches Latinos observing him, then strolling away, visibly uncomfortable. So he tries to do his buying and errands in one other city half-hour away.

He blamed the Facebook teams. They had created a local weather of “unreasonable fear” in Ingram. “What do they think I’m going to do right now?” he requested, seated at his desk within the taco store. A gradual stream of shoppers, a lot of them white, approached a counter staffed by two younger Mexican sisters. He stated their father used to cover out in Hunt to keep away from being pulled over on the town. Some of their co-workers had stop months earlier than, too uncomfortable to serve Alexander when he got here in for breakfast. But when the taco store proprietor sees him, he stated, she hugs him.

“I know the status of everybody in this room,” he stated. He recommended everybody who labored there was undocumented. Whether they disappeared or had been allowed to remain was as much as him. And at this time, a minimum of, he was simply there for breakfast.

“They’re fine, right?”