You can read our full story here (w/ @propublica + @nytmag) nytimes.com/2026/10/25/magaz…

This is not just a story about one community. It's about all communities, and how immigration enforcement is changing their relationships with their police departments. It begs the question: what have we, as a society, signed up for?

He is just 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 the same ICE partnership program Ingram joined.

Alexander says it isn’t his fault when drivers break traffic laws, and that he’s just doing his job when he stops them. He says it isn’t his fault that some drivers end up being people who had entered the country illegally. But he still grapples often with the fallout.

When I visited the village, one elderly resident — who had never set foot in Ingram — estimated some 20 or 30 people in the village were recent deportees from the town. “El Charger negro,” he said, with a knowing nod.

But for people in and around Ingram, the town’s police work has absolutely upended their lives. Alexander’s reputation even reached as far as La Ceja, a village in Guanajuato, a state in central Mexico.

More than once, Alexander has let people go. He also told @McKenzieFunk and me that he sometimes shared his lunch with the people he detained and let them hold onto their phones to call loved ones from the rear seat of the Charger.

But the weight of what Alexander was doing started to settle on him late last year. He said he gets flashbacks about a specific traffic stop, when he handed ICE the husband of a woman he knew. It was between Christmas and New Year’s. She was less than 2 weeks postpartum.

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

In Ingram, his new police chief was under pressure from the City Council to do more: more traffic stops, more citations, more arrests, more numbers. So Alexander told the chief that the sheriff’s office had a deal with ICE, he said, and that Ingram should look into it.

Alexander moved back to Ingram, where he started his law enforcement career years earlier, after losing his last job at the county sheriff’s office.

I wanted to know more. I spent several hours talking to the officer, Jaron Alexander, and he’s not a self-professed true believer in Trump’s mass deportation campaign. So why had he decided to help deport his neighbors?

I found that one Ingram officer was clocking in far more hours and raking in more funds working for ICE than his coworkers, according to paystubs and timesheets I later acquired. Sometimes, he spent an entire 12-hour shift working for ICE.

So as I headed to Ingram for the first time in March, I wanted to know who the local faces of the national immigration crackdown were. Who was driving the black Dodge Charger? propublica.org/article/depor…

We knew that in September 2025, ICE announced new incentives for the 287(g) police partnership program, including a $100K vehicle stipend, quarterly performance bonuses + overtime pay for officers. Ingram opted in. That meant its cops would serve as deputy immigration agents.

One masonry contractor told @mckenziefunk and me that his crew of 30 was down to eight after some were detained and others fled town. A job helping rebuild a nearby flood-damaged post office, which should have taken four days, took two weeks.

Everyone I talked to had, in some way, been impacted by whoever was driving the black Dodge Charger. Some Latino residents moved to nearby cities. One Mexican restaurant went from 200 daily take-out orders to just 50.

This is a town of three stoplights, five gas stations, five Mexican restaurants, and five churches. It is — or was — 45% Latino. Yet within a year of the flood, the town’s tiny PD had delivered the equivalent of 10% of Ingram to ICE.

The cop was handing them off to federal immigration agents. As early as a month after the flood, laborers were adding an extra 90 minutes to their daily commutes, just to avoid Ingram’s five-minute stretch of highway.