He Helped Deport 200 People. Now He Has Misgivings.

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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 United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement that would roil the town and tear Martinez’s family apart.

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Within three months of the baptism party, Alexander and Ingram’s other patrol officer had delivered at least 70 people to immigration agents, picking off what the police chief called a “dumbfounding” number of undocumented drivers. Within a year, they would hand over the equivalent of 10 percent of Ingram to ICE.

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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 — even killing — the citizens who tried to stand in their path.

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’s most aggressive form, the so-called task force model, 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. “By joining forces with ICE,” the announcement read, “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 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.

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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 — and number of what he called “deportations.” (He later explained this was his imprecise shorthand for “immigration-related enforcement activities.”) At the council’s October 2025 meeting, held a couple of weeks after Alexander showed up at the Martinez family’s baptism party, Breshears reported a remarkable 162 traffic stops by Ingram’s two patrol officers — Alexander and Christian Perez, who was 25 — 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.

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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. “I don’t care who’s in the car,” he says. “I really don’t.”

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Alexander received his first ICE payments in early December. In January, as the country’s 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.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, 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.

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According to Chief Breshears, Ingram had logged 194 “immigration-related incidents” as of this August. Whether every handover led to a deportation, Breshears couldn’t say. Alexander says he doesn’t know how many of the 194 are people he stopped. But he says he has now let at least 10 people go — many, though not all of them, mothers of young children.

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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’s 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.

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He said he hadn’t 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. “I think it’s skewed a little bit,” he said, looking at the pay stubs we had gathered.