Reporting Highlights
- The Shadow Surge: In January 2025, President Donald Trump revived a troubled ICE program that deputizes cops as deportation officers.
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that → revive → officers
Over 29,000 local officers nationwide have enlisted.
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officers → enlist → ?
Ingram, Texas, was rebuilding from a historic flood when its Police Department signed on with ICE.
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Department → rebuild → ICE
Within a year, cops would hand over the equivalent of 10% of the town.
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cops → hand → town
The local face of the national immigration crackdown became Officer Jaron Alexander.
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face → become → crackdown
After suggesting ICE’s program to his chief, he grapples daily with the consequences.
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he → suggest → consequences
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
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who → write → story
The new patrol officer parked his black Dodge Charger outside a house off Main Street and approached on foot.
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officer → park → foot
A Mexican ballad was playing.
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ballad → play → ?
Someone had called in a noise complaint, claiming it sounded as if people were fighting.
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people → call → complaint
But as the officer, Jaron Alexander, got closer, he found nothing of the sort.
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he → get → sort
A middle-aged woman greeted him as her daughter, Joanna Martinez, petite and visibly pregnant, looked on.
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daughter → greet → him
“What kind of party are you all having?” she remembers him asking.
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him → have → party
They were celebrating a 3-month-old’s baptism over pozole verde, horchata and beers.
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They → celebrate → verde
Alexander ran some IDs and found no issues.
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Alexander → run → issues
The music wasn’t even that loud, he thought.
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he → think → ?
He told them to have a good night, and then he left.
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he → tell → night
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.
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Alexander → have → 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’s family apart.
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that → sign → family
“Her and I, at the beginning, I felt like we were running into each other all the time,” 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’s deportation campaign.
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that → feel → campaign
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.
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immigration → pull → them
He didn’t.
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He → do → ?
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.
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they → pull → party
Alexander handed him over to immigration agents as well.
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Alexander → hand → agents
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.
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she → pull → car
He warned her that the car’s window tint was illegal and let her go.
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her → warn → her
After that, he says, he caught a glimpse of her and her husband and their newborn daughter in the toy aisle at Walmart.
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he → say → Walmart
Martinez told us she doesn’t think it was even her that day — her baby girl was then just days old, and she couldn’t imagine running errands with her so soon.
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she → tell → her
But in Alexander’s memory, she was shopping for Christmas presents, just like him.
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she → shop → him
Alexander, who is in his mid-30s, with dirty blond hair already turning gray, says he didn’t come back to Ingram to help deport his neighbors.
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he → turn → neighbors
In his telling, he just ended up making it part of his job.
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it → end → 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’s deputy.
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he → start → deputy
But things recently started to fall apart, first in his marriage, next at the sheriff’s 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.
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divorce → start → it
He says the investigator called him an “embarrassment to the profession.”
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investigator → say → profession
The sheriff’s office fired him.
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office → fire → him
(Alexander said at the time, and again to us, that he did not have the affair.)
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he → say → affair
Ingram’s Police Department took him back just when its new chief — its eighth in five years — was under pressure from the City Council to do more: more traffic stops, more citations, more arrests, more numbers.
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chief → take → stops
Alexander says he told the chief that the sheriff’s office had a deal with ICE and that Ingram should look into it; maybe it could help the department grow.
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department → say → it
“Blame me,” he eventually told people.
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he → blame → people
“It’s my fault in a way.”
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It → ’ → way
…and 303 more, not listed.
The Aporia
