Ingram, Texas, is a town of about 1,900 people on the Guadalupe River. It is — or was — about 45% Latino.

Then the town signed up for a Trump administration program that pays local police to act as immigration agents. According to an investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, Ingram's two patrol officers went on to hand over the equivalent of 10% of the town to ICE within a year.

This happened while Ingram was still digging out from the worst flood in a century, the July 2025 disaster that killed at least 139 people along the Guadalupe. Among the people pulled over were construction workers on their way to rebuild it.

The program Trump brought back

The deal Ingram signed is called a 287(g) agreement, after the section of immigration law that allows it. Its most aggressive version, the "task force model," turns local officers into deputy immigration agents on patrol. They can stop a car for a cracked windshield, check the driver's papers, and hand them to ICE.

That version had been shut down for a dozen years, and for a reason. In December 2011, the Justice Department found that Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office in Maricopa County, Arizona, one of the program's early partners, was stopping Latino drivers at four to nine times the rate of similar non-Latino drivers. Homeland Security suspended Arpaio's agreement, and NPR reports the task force model was discontinued in 2012 after the Justice Department found evidence of racial profiling.

ProPublica reports that ICE revived the task force model the day Trump returned to office in January 2025. In September 2025, ICE added money to get departments to sign up:

• $100,000 for a new vehicle for each agency
• $7,500 in equipment money for every participating officer
• Money to cover salaries and overtime for officers doing the work
• Quarterly performance bonuses, which NPR describes as officer bonuses "based on how many undocumented people they find"

ICE's announcement told police departments: "By joining forces with ICE, 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."

NPR also reports an estimate from the immigration advocacy group FWD.us that the payments ICE has promised could add up to as much as $2 billion this year alone.

What the money bought in Ingram

Ingram's City Council had been pushing its police chief, the town's eighth in five years, for more traffic stops, more tickets and more arrests. The ICE deal delivered.

• In just 20 days in the fall of 2025, the town's two patrol officers made 162 traffic stops. In two months they made more stops than the department had made in the whole previous year. The council gave the chief an $18,000 raise.
• Within about three months, the two officers had delivered at least 70 people to immigration agents.
• By this August, the chief had logged 194 "immigration-related incidents."

The officer at the center of the story, Jaron Alexander, had been fired from the county sheriff's office before Ingram hired him back. City records show he earned $18,793.25 from ICE in nine months, on top of a base salary of about $70,000. That is more than a quarter of his base salary. His department hired two more officers, in part with ICE money.

"If you're taking federal money to do a job," Alexander told ProPublica, "I think you should do the job."

Who got taken

The people on the other end of those stops were mostly neighbors with jobs and families.

• Shortly after Christmas, Alexander stopped a truck for, the men in it recall, failing to signal a turn. The passenger was Ulices Macias. His wife, Joanna Martinez, arrived in tears with their 2-week-old daughter. Macias held the baby, and then an ICE agent chained him at the waist and led him away. With her husband gone, Martinez couldn't afford the payments on the trailer they shared, and moved back into her childhood bedroom with her two children.
• That June, Alexander stopped a young Honduran man driving his 12-year-old cousin, a boy with developmental disabilities, to a soccer game. The boy's parents were too afraid to come forward. Alexander handed the boy to ICE.
• Alexander told ProPublica he had personally deported "like six" members of Martinez's family.

One family notarized guardianship papers in case the parents were taken and the children were left behind. Many Latino workers began adding a 90-minute detour to their day just to avoid the stretch of highway the officers patrolled.

It hurt the flood rebuild and the town's businesses

Ingram sits in a county that voted 77% for Trump in 2024. Even there, business owners turned on the crackdown, because it was taking the people rebuilding their town.

• A contractor rebuilding the post office in nearby Hunt, which the flood destroyed, saw his crew drop from 30 workers to 8. A four-day job took two weeks.
• The manager rebuilding Ingram's Little League field, washed away in the flood, lost two workers.
• A housecleaning business lost its crew, which shrank from 30 people to fewer than 10.
• One Mexican restaurant's daily takeout orders fell from 200 to 50. A corner store lost about half its revenue.

Neal Secor, who calls himself "one of the most conservative guys you'll ever meet," lost four workers to Ingram police while rebuilding his family's flood-damaged rental cabins. He says he called the mayor, who told him they'd all voted for this. "I didn't vote for this," Secor says he answered. "I voted to get the bad guys out." Of his two longtime employees picked up coming back from a job repairing docks at a youth camp, he said: "These guys aren't them."

It isn't just Ingram

Ingram is one small piece of a national program. ProPublica counts more than 1,900 agencies in at least 30 states now signed up for the task force model, with more than 29,000 deputized officers. With their help, ICE set a record of more than 50,000 immigration arrests in August.

Republicans in Congress are paying for it. In June, a $70 billion ICE and border bill passed the House by two votes, and not one Republican voted no. The law's official summary lists 287(g) agreements among the things that money pays for. Some Republicans want to go further: Rep. Ben Cline's bill would cut off federal police hiring grants to any department that doesn't sign a 287(g) agreement within six months.

What the record shows

The Trump administration revived a deportation program that had been shut down after the Justice Department found it was used for racial profiling, then paid local police to join it: $100,000 per agency for vehicles, plus money for officers' pay and performance bonuses. In Ingram, Texas, a town of 1,900 still rebuilding from a flood that killed at least 139 people, two officers turned over the equivalent of 10% of the town. One of them earned $18,793.25 from ICE in nine months, while a contractor rebuilding the town's destroyed post office watched his crew fall from 30 workers to 8.

Source

A Texas Cop Signed on to Help ICE Deport His Neighbors. It Tore the Town Apart. — Francesca D'Annunzio, McKenzie Funk and Kirsten Luce, ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine