{"id":476012,"date":"2026-10-25T04:38:20","date_gmt":"2026-10-25T04:38:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/476012\/"},"modified":"2026-10-25T04:38:20","modified_gmt":"2026-10-25T04:38:20","slug":"the-small-town-cop-who-helped-ice-deport-his-ingram-texas-neighbors-propublica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/476012\/","title":{"rendered":"The Small-Town Cop Who Helped ICE Deport His Ingram, Texas, Neighbors \u2014 ProPublica"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reporting Highlights<\/p>\n

The Shadow Surge: In January 2025, President Donald Trump revived a troubled ICE program that deputizes cops as deportation officers. Over 29,000 local officers nationwide have enlisted.<\/p>\n

After the Flood: Ingram, Texas, was rebuilding from a historic flood when its Police Department signed on with ICE. Within a year, cops would hand over the equivalent of 10% of the town.<\/p>\n

Cop on the Ground: The local face of the national immigration crackdown became Officer Jaron Alexander. After suggesting ICE\u2019s program to his chief, he grapples daily with the consequences.<\/p>\n

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.<\/p>\n

The new patrol officer parked his black Dodge Charger outside a house off Main Street and approached on foot. A Mexican ballad was playing. Someone had called in a noise complaint, claiming it sounded as if people were fighting.<\/p>\n

But as the officer, Jaron Alexander, got closer, he found nothing of the sort. A middle-aged woman greeted him as her daughter, Joanna Martinez, petite and visibly pregnant, looked on. \u201cWhat kind of party are you all having?\u201d she remembers him asking. Behind her were three generations of an extended family. They were celebrating a 3-month-old\u2019s baptism over pozole verde, horchata and beers.<\/p>\n

Alexander ran some IDs and found no issues. The music wasn\u2019t even that loud, he thought. He told them to have a good night, and then he left.<\/p>\n

That encounter, in early October last year, was the first of many that Alexander and Martinez would have in tiny Ingram, Texas, a 1.5-square-mile town of 1,900 people beside the Guadalupe River. But it was the only one before Ingram signed an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that would roil the town and tear Martinez\u2019s family apart.<\/p>\n

\u201cHer and I, at the beginning, I felt like we were running into each other all the time,\u201d Alexander told us, in one of eight conversations over four months that offer a rare window into the thoughts of one of the local police officers on the front lines of the Trump administration\u2019s deportation campaign.<\/p>\n

In a town as small as Ingram, drivable in five minutes end to end, more run-ins were probably inevitable. Later that October, Alexander pulled over a work truck for rolling through a stop sign, and soon there Martinez was, demanding that he let her friends go rather than let immigration take them. He didn\u2019t. He pulled over another driver in November who turned out to be her cousin, the father of the baby they celebrated at the baptism party. Alexander handed him over to immigration agents as well.<\/p>\n

\"AIngram, a town of under 2,000 people, is \u2014 or was \u2014 45% Latino. The police helped deport the equivalent of 10% of Ingram\u2019s population.<\/p>\n

He pulled over Martinez herself a few weeks before she was due to give birth, she says, surprising her when he knew her name and the type of car she typically drove. He warned her that the car\u2019s window tint was illegal and let her go. After that, he says, he caught a glimpse of her and her husband and their newborn daughter in the toy aisle at Walmart. Martinez told us she doesn\u2019t think it was even her that day \u2014 her baby girl was then just days old, and she couldn\u2019t imagine running errands with her so soon. But in Alexander\u2019s memory, she was shopping for Christmas presents, just like him.<\/p>\n

Alexander, who is in his mid-30s, with dirty blond hair already turning gray, says he didn\u2019t come back to Ingram to help deport his neighbors. In his telling, he just ended up making it part of his job. The town was where he started his law-enforcement career years earlier, before he took a better-paying position with the county, as a sheriff\u2019s deputy. But things recently started to fall apart, first in his marriage, next at the sheriff\u2019s office: A 185-page internal investigation found that he had an affair before his divorce was final and used a county vehicle to carry it out, then lied about it all. He says the investigator called him an \u201cembarrassment to the profession.\u201d The sheriff\u2019s office fired him. (Alexander said at the time, and again to us, that he did not have the affair.)<\/p>\n

Ingram\u2019s Police Department took him back just when its new chief \u2014 its eighth in five years \u2014 was under pressure from the City Council to do more: more traffic stops, more citations, more arrests, more numbers. Alexander says he told the chief that the sheriff\u2019s office had a deal with ICE and that Ingram should look into it; maybe it could help the department grow. \u201cBlame me,\u201d he eventually told people. \u201cIt\u2019s my fault in a way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Donald Trump had retaken the presidency with a promise to carry out \u201cthe largest deportation in the history of our country.\u201d America was still figuring out what that meant. Finding and expelling up to 4% of the U.S. population \u2014 the 14 million residents who are estimated to be undocumented \u2014 wasn\u2019t something a few thousand ICE agents could do on their own.<\/p>\n

Underway in Chicago that fall, and soon in Minneapolis, was one version of how the administration could try to do it: masked agents from across the federal government surging into a liberal city to round up immigrants, beating back \u2014 even killing \u2014 the citizens who tried to stand in their path.<\/p>\n

But a quieter kind of surge was spreading across the country at the same time. In September 2025, ICE announced new incentives for a partnership program known as 287(g). The program\u2019s most aggressive form, the so-called task force model<\/a>, which Ingram opted in to, enlists local police officers as deputy immigration agents, and the new incentives included a $100,000 vehicle stipend, a $7,500 equipment stipend for every participating officer, quarterly performance bonuses and funding to help cover officer salaries and overtime. \u201cBy joining forces with ICE,\u201d the announcement read, \u201cyou\u2019re not just gaining access to these unprecedented reimbursement opportunities \u2014 you\u2019re becoming part of a national effort to ensure the safety of every American family.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alexander completed an online course with ICE a few weeks after the baptism party, qualifying him for time-and-a-half pay whenever he helped the agency pick up immigrants. Here in the Texas Hill Country, he soon became the local face of the national crackdown.<\/p>\n

\"A\u201cI\u2019m friendly with the people that I meet,\u201d Alexander says, \u201cespecially when they\u2019re friendly to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ingram was just starting to recover from its worst natural disaster in a century, the flood that summer that killed at least 139 people up and down the Guadalupe River, including 25 girls at Camp Mystic. In the riverbed, towering bald cypress trees now stood at a lean, their branches swept back by a 30-foot surge of water and mud, their trunks still plastered with debris. As construction workers rebuilding the community traveled to their jobsites via Junction Highway, Ingram\u2019s five-lane main thoroughfare, a black Charger began stopping them before they could get there.<\/p>\n

Within three months of the baptism party, Alexander and Ingram\u2019s other patrol officer had delivered at least 70 people to immigration agents, picking off what the police chief called a \u201cdumbfounding\u201d number of undocumented drivers. Within a year, they would hand over the equivalent of 10% of Ingram to ICE.<\/p>\n

The weight of what Alexander was doing started to settle on him after Christmas. He says he was out patrolling as one of his new ICE handlers, a man in a ball cap and dark glasses, hovered nearby in an unmarked SUV. Around lunchtime, Alexander followed two Latino men in a 2008 GMC truck for several blocks before stopping them, they recall him saying, for failing to signal a turn.<\/p>\n

A young man sat in the passenger seat. Alexander checked his papers along with the driver\u2019s and determined that both were undocumented. The agent in the unmarked SUV rolled up behind them. Alexander realized who the man in the passenger seat was only after Martinez arrived in tears. It was her husband, Ulices Macias, the father of her newborn daughter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t normally do this,\u201d Martinez recalls Alexander telling her, \u201cbut I\u2019m going to open up the car. I\u2019m going to take the handcuffs off him.\u201d He let the family have a moment together. In a video taken by Martinez\u2019s younger sister, Alexander stood by, expressionless, as Martinez embraced Macias by the rear door of the Charger. He watched Macias cradle his 2-week-old baby girl, swaddled in a white blanket, and hug Martinez\u2019s 4-year-old son, his stepson.<\/p>\n

Then the ICE agent put the handcuffs back on Martinez\u2019s husband, wrapped a chain around his waist and led him away. Alexander says Martinez threw herself to the ground and sobbed.<\/p>\n

Images of the family he broke up shortly after Christmas would intrude on Alexander\u2019s thoughts for months, he told us. But it didn\u2019t keep him from doing his job. His next shift came a few days after he handed over Macias, and he was back in the Charger, back to stopping cars on Junction Highway.<\/p>\n

Joanna Martinez\u2019s husband, Ulices Macias, is detained by Alexander on Dec. 28, 2025, in this video taken by Martinez\u2019s younger sister. Courtesy of the Martinez family<\/p>\n

\u201cMini Guanajuato\u201d<\/p>\n

Alexander says he didn\u2019t always want to be a police officer. He describes himself as \u201ckind of a chameleon.\u201d He grew up in nearby Harper, tried a few different colleges without graduating and spent his 20s cycling though jobs in freight logistics, pest control and insurance.<\/p>\n

Still seeking his calling, he arranged a ride-along with a police officer outside Austin. What sold him on policing was the suburban officer\u2019s power to enforce the law as he saw fit. That day, they pulled over a woman who had a warrant out for her arrest. She was coming back from the store with children and groceries in the back seat.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can use your discretion,\u201d Alexander recalls the officer telling him. Wouldn\u2019t they be doing more harm if they took her? What would the kids do without their mother? And wouldn\u2019t it all create more paperwork? The officer let her go. Alexander imagined himself making the same kinds of judgment calls. In 2021, he enrolled in the police academy.<\/p>\n

Even before the floods, tensions were rising in Ingram. Hundreds of Mexican immigrants and their families had settled there in recent decades as an increasingly militarized border made it harder for seasonal ranch hands and other workers to cross back and forth. Latinos would come to make up 45% of its population, and some residents began affectionately calling Ingram \u201cmini Guanajuato,\u201d after the central Mexican state where many have roots. Yet when Alexander returned, Ingram\u2019s City Council still consisted of six white men.<\/p>\n

\"FourMayor Claud Jordan (in shorts and cap), Chief Dustin Breshears (center) and Mayor Pro Tem Rocky Hawkins (seated second from right) attend an Ingram City Council meeting in August.<\/p>\n

A council faction led by Claud Jordan, now the town\u2019s mayor, and Rocky Hawkins, now the mayor pro tem, came to power in November 2020, in a revolt against a new sewer project. They abolished Ingram\u2019s city administrator position and took direct control of the Police Department, cycling through chief after chief. Five former city employees say Hawkins regularly used racist slurs for Mexicans. Four say that he pressured the city to go after Latinos through code enforcement or targeted patrols, and two say that Jordan did, too. One of the employees recalls Hawkins complaining that Mexicans were \u201ctaking over Ingram.\u201d (Hawkins and Jordan each declined to speak on the record or address detailed questions we sent them by email. In a brief text-message exchange, Hawkins said that none of it was right but declined to offer any specific concerns.)<\/p>\n

These were the men the new chief, Dustin Breshears, had to answer to as ICE revived the task force program, which had been shut down for a dozen years until the day Trump returned to office in January 2025. ICE, under President Barack Obama, had phased out the program after some of the first sheriffs to participate in it, including Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, used it to disproportionately target Latinos<\/a> in their communities. Investigations by the Department of Justice found that deputies in the task force program pulled over Latino drivers at up to nine times the rate of other drivers and that some retaliated violently against people who accused them of racial profiling. But now, under Trump, any law-enforcement agency, no matter how troubled or small, was encouraged to sign up.<\/p>\n

Breshears began appearing at City Council meetings armed with statistics: number of arrests since the last meeting, number of traffic stops, number of cleared cases from the backlog of hundreds he inherited \u2014 and number of what he called \u201cdeportations.\u201d (He later explained this was his imprecise shorthand for \u201cimmigration-related enforcement activities.\u201d) At the council\u2019s October 2025 meeting, held a couple of weeks after Alexander showed up at the Martinez family\u2019s baptism party, Breshears reported a remarkable 162 traffic stops by Ingram\u2019s two patrol officers \u2014 Alexander and Christian Perez, who was 25 \u2014 in just 20 days. (Perez declined to comment.) The officers made more stops in two months than the department had made in the entire previous year. The City Council gave Breshears an $18,000 raise.<\/p>\n

\"AChristian Perez, one of the other Ingram police officers, at a traffic stop. He and Alexander made more stops in two months than the department had made in the entire previous year.<\/p>\n

Before Breshears arrived and Alexander returned in August 2025, the weekly blotter in The West Kerr Current, the local newspaper, documented the humdrum of community policing: loose dogs, neighborhood disputes, code violations. Then, suddenly, it was filled with drivers stopped for defective brake lights, damaged license plates, cracked windshields, illegal window tints or other unspecified \u201cequipment violations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Breshears and Alexander strongly deny targeting Latinos. \u201cIt\u2019s honestly not what\u2019s happening,\u201d Breshears says, noting that his half brother, wife and daughters have Mexican heritage. Ingram\u2019s traffic stops were simply up across the board, he says, so more Latinos were getting stopped. He shared statistics showing that stops of Latinos were proportional to their share of the population.<\/p>\n

Alexander, who on top of his roughly $70,000 base salary was now logging dozens of hours per month for ICE, told us the same. \u201cI don\u2019t care who\u2019s in the car,\u201d he says. \u201cI really don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEl Charger Negro\u201d<\/p>\n

As the ICE program took hold in Ingram, warnings about Alexander and his black Charger \u2014 the department has several \u2014 spread through the Hill Country and far beyond. Groups on Facebook and WhatsApp seemed to track his every move. The Charger was outside Rita\u2019s taco shop. The Charger was near Dollar General. The Charger was parked by the church. A member of one particularly active Facebook group texted him screenshots, and he scrolled through blurry photos of himself looming behind work trucks or leaning over car windows.<\/p>\n

Many Latino motorists trying to reach worksites up the Guadalupe began driving an extra 90 minutes each day to avoid the section of Junction Highway that Alexander patrolled. Ranch hands began sleeping at their employers\u2019 properties in nearby Hunt, coming to town only when they knew \u2014 or hoped \u2014 that Ingram\u2019s officers would be off duty. Residents were rattled the day a Customs and Border Protection helicopter hovered above town and the elementary school went into lockdown as the police hunted for a Mexican man who had run from one of Alexander\u2019s traffic stops.<\/p>\n

Workers Driving Between Kerrville and Hunt Add an Extra 90 Minutes to Their Daily Commute to Avoid Traffic Stops in Ingram<\/p>\n

\t\t\"A
\n\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

High number of
traffic stops<\/p>\n

55-mile route to avoid downtown Ingram<\/p>\n

\t\t\"A
\n\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

55-mile route to avoid downtown Ingram<\/p>\n

High number of
traffic stops<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLucas Waldron\/ProPublica<\/p>\n

One family notarized guardianship papers, in case the parents were detained and the children left behind. One woman swore Alexander showed up outside a memorial service and asked people for IDs. Another woman said he detained her and her husband when they returned home from church. Parties dwindled. Invite lists shrank. People began to move away, to Kerrville and San Antonio, and Alexander\u2019s reputation reached as far as La Ceja, a village in the mountains of central Mexico, where an elderly resident said he and his neighbors were familiar with the Texas town\u2019s police. \u201cEl Charger negro,\u201d he said, with a knowing nod. He estimated that some 20 or 30 people in the village were recent deportees from Ingram.<\/p>\n

Alexander\u2019s fortunes seemed to rise as the Martinez family\u2019s fell. With her husband gone, Joanna Martinez couldn\u2019t afford payments on the trailer they shared. She and their infant and her 4-year-old son moved back into her childhood bedroom in her mother\u2019s crowded home, where several relatives and their children also lived. She tried to stay connected with her husband, Macias, via WhatsApp calls while working as much as she could as a house cleaner to keep afloat. \u201cI can\u2019t lock myself up in my room and just cry,\u201d Martinez says.<\/p>\n

Winter for Martinez and her family brought a string of dark incidents. The January arrest of her cousin near the carwash as she drove to pick up her children from school. A canceled baby shower for her older sister, Jazmin, over a rumor that the Charger planned to show up. Another cousin, himself the father of a newborn, stopped and taken right in front of her mother\u2019s house as Martinez watched.<\/p>\n

A half dozen of the attendees from the October baptism party would soon be gone from Ingram, after being detained and deported or leaving to join relatives who had been. Some people had gotten wind that Alexander was making money off his enforcement. When a Spanish-language Facebook page shared a photo of him questioning the passenger of a beige Ford pickup, someone posted an animated image in the comments: a stack of green dollar bills growing taller and taller in an endless loop.<\/p>\n

A view of the stretch of Junction Highway where many people are detained Sean Cronen for The New York Times<\/p>\n

A view of the stretch of Junction Highway where many people are detained Sean Cronen for The New York Times<\/p>\n

Alexander received his first ICE payments in early December. In January, as the country\u2019s attention turned to the violent immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, he was often spending three or four hours a day and sometimes entire shifts working on behalf of the federal agency. By the time federal authorities announced a drawdown in Minneapolis on Feb. 12, Alexander had already made $3,264.46 from his task force hours, according to his pay stubs.<\/p>\n

Ingram was by then one of more than 750 task force model partners around the country, up from not quite 500 when it signed up in October. At least 43 million U.S. residents<\/a>, according to an analysis of ICE records by the legal data firm Titus Consulting, already lived in a county with an active task force agreement. Alexander was one of thousands of deputized officers in Texas alone.<\/p>\n

Agencies With 287(g) Task Force Model Agreements<\/p>\n

State-level<\/p>\n

County-level<\/p>\n

Local-level<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNote: Though Pinal County, Arizona, is listed as having an active agreement in data maintained by ICE, the agreement is under permanent injunction, so it does not appear in this map. Source: Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Initial data analysis by Andrew Thrasher of the legal data firm Titus Consulting. Additional analysis by ProPublica.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLucas Waldron\/ProPublica<\/p>\n

In interviews, Alexander described the immigration system he was enforcing as \u201cskewed\u201d and \u201cweird,\u201d but he saw himself as largely separate from these concerns. \u201cIf you\u2019re taking federal money to do a job,\u201d he says, \u201cI think you should do the job.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, he seemed to struggle with the contradictions of his role. He told us he sometimes shared his lunch with the people he detained and that he let them hold on to their phones to call loved ones from the rear seat of the Charger. He handcuffed them with their hands in the front rather than the back so they could use their hands.<\/p>\n

Martinez told us about a moment when she watched him detain one of her cousins. He allowed the man\u2019s wife and children to hug him goodbye and waited until his 7-year-old daughter wasn\u2019t looking to handcuff him. To Martinez, it seemed as if Alexander was trying to prove to her that he wasn\u2019t a bad person. \u201cBut I\u2019m not going to fall for it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

There was a protest in Ingram the following day against Trump\u2019s mass deportations. Martinez decided to go. As she stood among a few dozen protesters waving a handmade sign with the name \u201cJ. Alexander\u201d circled and crossed out, she saw him drive by again and again.<\/p>\n

\"AnAlexander responding to a call. \u201cIf I\u2019m being 100% honest,\u201d he says, \u201cI don\u2019t enjoy when families are separated.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few weeks later, Katie Winer, the leader of the group that staged the protest, was following the Charger after Alexander detained another immigrant in a traffic stop. He approached her car and threatened to arrest her if she followed him in the future, on charges of interfering with public duties. But he also seemed to want to talk, and she recorded him as they discussed what was going on in Ingram. \u201cI think you guys are making a bigger deal of it than they are,\u201d he said of the people he handed over to ICE. The only outliers were \u201cloudmouths\u201d like Martinez and \u201cher little crew.\u201d<\/p>\n

Winer interjected that Martinez\u2019s husband was the family\u2019s breadwinner, and it was Alexander\u2019s actions that tore them apart.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy actions did not,\u201d Alexander said. \u201cHis actions did. I made a traffic stop. He was here illegally. That\u2019s not my fault.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, Alexander\u2019s uncertainty seemed to be growing. In March, another of Martinez\u2019s cousins confronted him outside the taco shop, pressing him about Macias as she filmed with her phone.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I\u2019m being 100% honest,\u201d he said, \u201cI don\u2019t enjoy when families are separated, like with the Joanna situation. That kind of fucked me up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI Voted to Get the Bad Guys Out\u201d<\/p>\n

A month later, as Ingram\u2019s handoffs to ICE surpassed 100 people, another video of Alexander circulated among a small group of community members. It showed an evening traffic stop, at least the fifth stop Alexander made that day. He had followed a silver Ford F-250 from the highway until it pulled into the gravel driveway of a mobile home. There, the man in the passenger seat, a landscaper named Victor Ramirez Hernandez, tried to hurry inside. Alexander grabbed him before he could get there.<\/p>\n

The truck\u2019s driver pulled out his phone and began filming. \u201cWhy are you arresting him?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not,\u201d Alexander answered, struggling to place handcuffs on Ramirez as he squirmed. \u201cI\u2019m detaining him.\u201d Then he wrapped his hands around the laborer\u2019s chest, lifted him off the ground and slammed him down on the driveway. \u201cI played nice with you, and now I\u2019m done,\u201d he said. He straddled Ramirez and cuffed his hands behind his back.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s bleeding because you hit him,\u201d the driver said evenly. They argued back and forth.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re an idiot,\u201d Alexander said, his face reddening. \u201cShut up. The more you talk it\u2019s just making you look stupider.\u201d (Alexander declined to comment on this incident. Breshears, who reviewed body-camera footage, says Alexander\u2019s use of force was justified to control a potentially dangerous situation.)<\/p>\n

Acrimony pulsed through Ingram that spring. In the Latino community, family members and neighbors accused one another of snitching, which Alexander says did happen. Young women accused one another of having affairs with him, which he denies, insisting that people just misinterpreted his attempts to be kind. \u201cI\u2019m friendly with the people that I meet,\u201d he says, \u201cespecially when they\u2019re friendly to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

One subject of these rumors was Martinez. She and her older sister scoffed at them. \u201cHe\u2019s taken our whole family at this point,\u201d Jazmin says. \u201cAnd she\u2019s going to sleep with him? It\u2019s really annoying.\u201d But some in the community, even cousins, stopped speaking with her. \u201cIt\u2019s like \u2018Hunger Games,\u2019\u201d Martinez says.<\/p>\n

As Latinos fled and avoided Ingram, the daily takeout orders at one Mexican restaurant on the edge of town dropped to 50 from 200. A corner store catering to immigrants lost around half its revenue and most of its Latino regulars. Landlords in a mobile-home park just outside town struggled to find tenants.<\/p>\n

\"TheAs Latinos fled and avoided Ingram, many businesses suffered. At Los Altos de Jalisco, a local restaurant, daily takeout orders dropped to 50 from 200.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t just Ingram\u2019s Latino community that was reeling. For Ingram\u2019s non-Hispanic business owners, including many Republicans in a county that voted 77% for Trump in the 2024 election, the immigration crackdown was becoming an outrage. It was taking people they worked with and knew well. It was interfering with flood reconstruction. It was hurting the local economy.<\/p>\n

The owner of a heavily damaged strip mall on the western edge of town, Steve Edelstein, lamented the loss of two workers who were helping him rebuild. \u201cTechnically local law enforcement is doing their job,\u201d he told a reporter for The West Kerr Current, emphasizing that he supported Trump. \u201cBut it isn\u2019t helping the community.\u201d A manager overseeing the rebuilding of Ingram\u2019s Little League field, which was washed away in the flood, made an angry call to the city after two of his workers were picked up, Breshears says. A contractor helping rebuild Hunt\u2019s destroyed post office had his crew reduced to eight workers from 30 \u2014 causing what should have been a four-day job to stretch to two weeks.<\/p>\n

Among the people who called Jordan, the mayor, to complain was his onetime high school classmate Neal Secor, who describes himself as \u201cone of the most conservative guys you\u2019ll ever meet.\u201d His family business, a cluster of rental cabins called Waltonia on the River, was nearly destroyed by the flood. He was struggling to rebuild. He says that in the spring, in two separate stops, the Ingram police detained four of his workers and handed them over to ICE \u2014 the second set as they returned from a job repairing the docks at a nearby youth camp, a favor Secor was trying to do for a neighbor.<\/p>\n

Secor says Jordan\u2019s defense was simple: You voted for this. They\u2019d all voted for this.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet me tell you something,\u201d Secor says he told Jordan. \u201cI didn\u2019t vote for this. I voted to get the bad guys out.\u201d The two employees detained coming back from the youth camp were like family, his friends and co-workers for over a decade. \u201cThere\u2019s still a lot of bad guys here,\u201d he continued. \u201cThese guys aren\u2019t them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"DeadMany local construction workers have been deported or have left Ingram, slowing down work, including recovery from the floods in 2025 and 2026.<\/p>\n

Secor recalls Jordan saying that Ingram\u2019s officers were just following the law. But, Secor wondered, why was it that he could drive 85 every day on the 75-mile-an-hour interstate and police officers just let him pass? He told Jordan he\u2019d put 175,000 miles on his truck and never been pulled over. \u201cIt\u2019s a matter of what laws you want to pick and choose,\u201d he recalls telling the mayor. \u201cWe all break laws every day if you really want to get down to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGod Wanted Me to Meet You\u201d<\/p>\n

On an unpaved side street in the Ingram hills in April, Alexander again faced a decision over whether to separate a young family. This time he had more of a choice; ICE had yet to arrive. A woman named Norma Luj\u00e1n took his hand and said she was praying for him.<\/p>\n

Luj\u00e1n, 61, runs a successful housecleaning company based in Ingram. She had heard of Alexander long before she confronted him. She had seen him in the Charger, too: on the side of Junction Highway as she made her way to jobs at vacation homes or youth camps up in Hunt. On the side of the highway on the way back. In her rearview mirror for four excruciating minutes one afternoon as her \u201cgirls,\u201d as she called her crew, held their breath and sank into their seats, protected by the tint of her car\u2019s windows and the fact that a license-plate reader would show it was registered to her, a Texas-born U.S. citizen.<\/p>\n

\"ANorma Luj\u00e1n confronted Alexander after he detained the husband of a woman who worked for her housecleaning company. \u201cI need you to look inside your heart,\u201d she said, \u201cand let him go.\u201d<\/p>\n

In January, at the carwash, Alexander had helped a sheriff\u2019s deputy take one of Luj\u00e1n\u2019s best employees into custody. The woman, Cinthya Carranza, was a single mother and asylum seeker from Guanajuato \u2014 and Joanna Martinez\u2019s cousin. Carranza was on her way to get her children from school after she and Luj\u00e1n spent the day cleaning houses. Later that day, Luj\u00e1n saw a Facebook post showing a familiar face in a mug shot: Carranza\u2019s. Luj\u00e1n broke into tears. To her, the arrest was a signal event. The Charger had mostly stopped men up to that point. This was the moment she understood that no one was safe.<\/p>\n

Luj\u00e1n started losing workers in droves after Carranza was taken \u2014 some to traffic stops, most for fear of having to drive through Ingram. Her crew of 30 people dropped to fewer than 10. She worried for her business, but she worried more, she said, for her workers, the lives they had made in Ingram and the relationships she had built with them. They invited her to parties and baptisms, surprised her with presents on her birthday. She often led them in prayer. \u201cI love them,\u201d she says. She promised she would try to protect them.<\/p>\n

When Luj\u00e1n\u2019s employee Maria called that April afternoon to say the officer in the Charger was outside her house, detaining her husband as he returned from work, Luj\u00e1n jumped into action. Maria (who asked to be identified by her middle name because she is undocumented) was eight months pregnant and already terrified that she would have to give birth alone. Alexander had taken her brother a week earlier. Now Maria was hiding behind the curtains of her home, sneaking peeks outside, hoping Alexander would let her husband go.<\/p>\n

\"AOne of Luj\u00e1n\u2019s cleaning company employees, who is from Guatemala, cleaning a home in Kerrville, Texas. She asked that her name and face not be used to protect her privacy.<\/p>\n

\u201cC\u00e1lmate\u201d \u2014 calm down \u2014 Luj\u00e1n told herself as she approached the Charger. \u201cC\u00e1lmate.\u201d She took a deep breath. She says Alexander was sitting in the driver\u2019s seat with the door propped open, staring at a tablet computer.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook, his wife has had a complicated pregnancy,\u201d she told him. (This was true.) \u201cShe\u2019s in the hospital.\u201d (For that lie, Luj\u00e1n says, she later prayed for forgiveness.)<\/p>\n

Then Luj\u00e1n reached out and grabbed Alexander\u2019s hand. \u201cI pray for your being, for your soul,\u201d she recalls telling him as she cried. \u201cI want you to think about what you\u2019re doing. Feel it. Feel it, please.\u201d She squeezed his hand. \u201cI need you to look inside your heart,\u201d she continued, \u201cand let him go.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alexander didn\u2019t react at first, in Luj\u00e1n\u2019s telling. \u201cGod wanted me to meet you,\u201d she said. He met her gaze.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m that guy that everyone talks about on Facebook,\u201d she recalls him finally saying. \u201cIf you think I don\u2019t lose any sleep, you\u2019re wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Luj\u00e1n pushed through the lump in her throat to speak. \u201cI\u2019m going to pray for you every night,\u201d she promised him. She says Alexander squeezed her hand back, then pulled away. He walked off to make a call. She couldn\u2019t make out much of what he said. It was quiet, save for the sound of Luj\u00e1n\u2019s sobs and the pebbles from the unpaved road crunching beneath the officer\u2019s feet.<\/p>\n

Then he returned to the Charger. \u201cGet him out of the car,\u201d Luj\u00e1n recalls him saying. \u201cHurry up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGod bless you,\u201d Luj\u00e1n said. \u201cGod will repay you for this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alexander says he doesn\u2019t remember the details of his interaction with Luj\u00e1n, but he confirms that he let Maria\u2019s husband go, calling it a matter of \u201chuman decency.\u201d He knew how hard it was to raise children. \u201cA woman needs rest,\u201d he says. \u201cShe needs help.\u201d Maria\u2019s husband \u201cneeds to be there helping out.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"MenThe night shift at a meat-processing plant in Ingram, two days before two employees driving to work there were detained and handed over to ICE. All the other male workers quit shortly after.<\/p>\n

At first, nothing seemed to change. Over the next two months, as the Hill Country prepared to welcome summer tourists and campers back after the devastation of the floods, Alexander worked around 100 task force hours, earning close to $5,000 from ICE.<\/p>\n

But the next time he ran into Joanna Martinez, he seemed to be having misgivings. It was early June, and he was eight months into the ICE program. He had pulled over another of her family friends on Junction Highway, a person she had known since childhood. Martinez got a phone call and rushed to the scene, as she had so many times before. \u201cI don\u2019t feel good about this,\u201d she recalls him saying when she arrived. \u201cI signed up to be a cop, not an ICE agent.\u201d (Alexander says he remembers that they talked and that he could have said something like that.)<\/p>\n

Later that month, he pulled over a young man from Honduras who was on his way to a soccer game with his cousin, a 12-year-old with developmental disabilities. The boy\u2019s father says he and his wife hid across the street watching it all happen, too terrified to step out and claim their son. The parents sent a friend from church, but she was not a legal guardian. Alexander says he had no choice but to hand the boy over to ICE, adding though that if he was one of the parents, he would see it differently. \u201cIf I\u2019m in that position, there\u2019s no way I\u2019m letting my kid go,\u201d he told us. \u201cI\u2019m probably fighting someone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within a couple of weeks, Alexander\u2019s task force hours dropped by about 40%, according to his pay stubs. It remains unclear if he tried to step back from immigration work or whether the number of undocumented drivers in Ingram had simply dwindled because of all he had already done.<\/p>\n

According to Chief Breshears, Ingram had logged 194 \u201cimmigration-related incidents\u201d as of this August. Whether every handover led to a deportation, Breshears couldn\u2019t say. Alexander says he doesn\u2019t know how many of the 194 are people he stopped. But he says he has now let at least 10 people go \u2014 many, though not all of them, mothers of young children.<\/p>\n

Alexander sees this, and his relationship to the Martinez family, as evidence of his humanity, despite what people say about him. \u201cFor context, I\u2019ve deported like six of their family members, and they\u2019re still friendly to me,\u201d he says. \u201cSo I\u2019m not the monster they make me out to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

On July 16, the skies over Ingram opened again, dropping nearly 19 inches of rain in a single day, and the Guadalupe again overtopped its banks, again destroying businesses and homes. In the predawn darkness in the early hours of the emergency, Alexander began racing toward Ingram in his black Charger to help. He had barely left his house when surging floodwaters consumed the vehicle, destroying the Charger\u2019s engine block. A driver in a pickup truck took him back home, and that\u2019s where he stayed until the storm receded.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne Free Pass\u201d<\/p>\n

Alexander remains only one cog in a deportation machine for which the federal government has now earmarked $240 billion. Today more than 1,900 agencies in at least 30 states have signed up for ICE\u2019s task force model, with more than 29,000 deputized officers. With their help, ICE recently hit a record of immigration arrests, totaling more than 50,000 in August.<\/p>\n

On Sept. 11, Alexander met one of us at a taco spot on Junction Highway. Ingram had changed in the year since his return. Whole neighborhoods had emptied out, and residents noticed fewer drivers on the streets. In part because of the money from ICE, the Police Department had hired two additional officers. As a Mexican ballad played over the speakers, Alexander warned against making too much of the leniency he showed to families like Maria\u2019s. \u201cIt\u2019s like one free pass, I guess,\u201d he said: If he encountered her husband again during a traffic stop, he would probably hand him over to ICE. He just thought letting the father-to-be go was the right call at the time. \u201cI mean, don\u2019t you?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

He said he hadn\u2019t made all that much money working with ICE. But city records show that his earnings from the agency already totaled $18,793.25 in nine months, more than a quarter of his base salary. \u201cI think it\u2019s skewed a little bit,\u201d he said, looking at the pay stubs we had gathered.<\/p>\n

Alexander said it was hard for him to be out in public anymore. He can\u2019t escape being recognized in Ingram and Kerrville. Sometimes he catches Latinos staring at him, then walking away, visibly uncomfortable. So he tries to do his shopping and errands in another town 30 minutes away.<\/p>\n

\"AA driver passing one of the Ingram Police Department\u2019s black Chargers along Junction Highway.<\/p>\n

He blamed the Facebook groups. They had created a climate of \u201cunreasonable fear\u201d in Ingram. \u201cWhat do they think I\u2019m going to do right now?\u201d he asked, seated at his table in the taco shop. A steady stream of customers, many of them white, approached a counter staffed by two young Mexican sisters. He said their father used to hide out in Hunt to avoid being pulled over in town. Some of their co-workers had quit months before, too uncomfortable to serve Alexander when he came in for breakfast. But when the taco shop owner sees him, he said, she hugs him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know the status of everybody in this room,\u201d he said. He suggested everyone who worked there was undocumented. Whether they disappeared or were allowed to stay was up to him. And today, at least, he was just there for breakfast.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re fine, right?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reporting Highlights The Shadow Surge: In January 2025, President Donald Trump revived a troubled ICE program that deputizes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":476013,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":["post-476012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/476013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}