One Agent’s Doubts

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Abstract: "What does it feel like for ICE deputies who nab their neighbors and break up families? That’s the subject of this riveting look at one conflicted enforcer in The New York Times Magazine.

Jaron Alexander is a police officer with a sideline helping ICE. He patrols Ingram, Texas, a town of 1.5 square miles and 1,900 people, where he sees his targets dropping their kids at school and shopping at Walmart. He has helped deport 200 people, and he defends his role: “If you’re taking federal money to do a job,” he said, “I think you should do the job.”

But he also has misgivings.

The Trump administration wants to rid the United States annually of one million (of the 14 million) people who entered the country illegally or overstayed their visas. They hold jobs, raise families, pay taxes, run churches, grill for their block parties. They are enmeshed in American society. They and their communities pay a price when they vanish.

So do some of the people who help deport them.

Two arrests
Alexander’s black Dodge Charger became well known around Ingram. Latino motorists began to drive the long way around his stakeouts every day.

But his deportation work began to weigh on him last Christmas, he told the reporters Francesca D’Annunzio and McKenzie Funk of ProPublica. Around then, he pulled over two Latino men in a GMC truck for failing to signal a turn — and recognized one of them. It was Ulices Macias, the father of a newborn daughter. He knew the man’s wife.

“I don’t normally do this,” he told her when she showed up to help her husband, “but I’m going to open up the car.” Alexander removed the handcuffs he’d placed on Macias, who hugged his wife, embraced his 4-year-old stepson and held his 2-week-old girl. Then a waiting ICE agent, who appeared on the scene after the traffic stop, cuffed him and took him away.

“I don’t enjoy when families are separated,” Alexander later told one of the family’s cousins. “That kind of fucked me up.”

Later, he made a different choice when Norma Luján, who runs a housecleaning company, confronted him. Alexander was detaining the husband of one of Luján’s employees, who was pregnant.

“I pray for your being, for your soul,” she recalls telling him as she cried. “I want you to think about what you’re doing. Feel it. Feel it, please.” She squeezed his hand. “I need you to look inside your heart,” she continued, “and let him go.”

Alexander didn’t react at first, in Luján’s telling. “God wanted me to meet you,” she said. He met her gaze.

Luján says that Alexander squeezed her hand back and then walked away to make a call. When he returned, he let the worker’s husband go, calling it a matter of “human decency.” He knew, he told the reporters, that a new father “needs to be there helping out.”...

Gift Link to the full story in this week's New York Times Magazine: nytimes.com - Ice deputy texas police

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