From the Paper of Record...A local Police Officer's second thoughts on helping ICE ruin lives
in his town...here's an excerpt...
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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.
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.”
Deputized
ICE pays local police officers to help with deportations. A department can get a $100,000 vehicle stipend and, for every officer who pitches in, $7,500 for equipment. Then there is money to cover salaries, overtime and quarterly performance bonuses. Alexander made almost $19,000 in nine months, according to city records — a big boost for someone whose base pay is about $70,000.
The immigration debate is ostensibly about U.S. policy. But immigration enforcement is about people. Their stories are complex, irreducible: Someone comes here and follows all the rules, except the ones about how to enter the country. Another takes money to help deport her but is anguished and haunted by his choices. This story, which you can read for free, captures how lives often resist easy caricature. They can be buffeted by political imperatives, the quest for safety, financial incentives and the most basic human emotions.
That’s interesting. That’s affecting. That’s journalism. It can have the pathos of a novel, but it’s true.
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Note:...the vast majority of Deportees have no criminal record...how does this make America any Greater?