ProPublica reports:

The new patrol officer parked his black Dodge Charger outside a house off Main Street and approached on foot. A Mexican ballad was playing. Someone had called in a noise complaint, claiming it sounded as if people were fighting.

But as the officer, Jaron Alexander, got closer, he found nothing of the sort. A middle-aged woman greeted him as her daughter, Joanna Martinez, petite and visibly pregnant, looked on. “What kind of party are you all having?” she remembers him asking. Behind her were three generations of an extended family. They were celebrating a 3-month-old’s baptism over pozole verde, horchata and beers.

Alexander ran some IDs and found no issues. The music wasn’t even that loud, he thought. He told them to have a good night, and then he left.

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 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that would roil the town and tear Martinez’s family apart. [Continue reading…]