A year after the Hill Country town of Ingram signed on to ICE's 287(g) task force program, its patrol officers had become a steady pipeline to federal immigration agents, and the town of about 1,900 people was deeply divided over it, according to an investigation by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine published by The Texas Tribune on Saturday.
The task force model, the most aggressive version of the program, deputizes local officers to act as immigration agents. In September 2025, the story says, ICE sweetened the offer for departments that join, with a $100,000 vehicle stipend, $7,500 in equipment money for each participating officer, quarterly performance bonuses and help paying salaries and overtime.
What happened in Ingram
Ingram, a 1.5-square-mile town on the Guadalupe River that was still rebuilding from the summer 2025 flood that killed at least 139 people along the river, joined in October 2025. Within three months its officers had turned at least 70 people over to immigration agents, the reporters found, and within a year the number equaled about a tenth of the town's population.
Police Chief Dustin Breshears counted 194 "immigration-related incidents" as of August. Latinos make up about 45% of Ingram's residents.
Much of the story follows Officer Jaron Alexander, who earned $18,793.25 from ICE work in nine months, according to city records the reporters obtained. Breshears and Alexander denied targeting Latinos; the chief shared figures showing stops of Latino drivers in line with their share of the population. "I don't care who's in the car," Alexander told the reporters.
He also said he had let at least 10 people go, many of them mothers of young children.
Opposition came from more than the immigrant community. The reporters describe non-Hispanic business owners, many of them Republicans in a county that gave Trump 77% of its vote in 2024, complaining that the stops were taking workers off flood rebuilding jobs; one contractor's crew fell from 30 workers to eight. A local restaurant's daily takeout orders dropped from 200 to 50.
