A year ago in tiny Ingram, Texas, a local police officer named Jaron Alexander responded to a noise complaint—a baptism party, it turned out, held by Joanna Martinez and her extended family. Shortly after, Alexander began working in tandem with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in an arrangement that has recently doubled the number of local police working with ICE. Within months, six people who attended Martinez’s party had been detained and deported, or else had fled from Ingram. Francesca D’Annunzio and McKenzie Funk grant impressive access to a local cop whose decision to work with ICE has transformed a small town into a claustrophobic nightmare, upending the local economy and fracturing countless relationships.

One family notarized guardianship papers, in case the parents were detained and the children left behind. One woman swore Alexander showed up outside a memorial service and asked people for IDs. Another woman said he detained her and her husband when they returned home from church. Parties dwindled. Invite lists shrank. People began to move away, to Kerrville and San Antonio, and Alexander’s reputation reached as far as La Ceja, a village in the mountains of central Mexico, where an elderly resident said he and his neighbors were familiar with the Texas town’s police. “El Charger negro,” he said, with a knowing nod. He estimated that some 20 or 30 people in the village were recent deportees from Ingram.

Alexander’s fortunes seemed to rise as the Martinez family’s fell. With her husband gone, Joanna Martinez couldn’t afford payments on the trailer they shared. She and their infant and her 4-year-old son moved back into her childhood bedroom in her mother’s crowded home, where several relatives and their children also lived. She tried to stay connected with her husband, Macias, via WhatsApp calls while working as much as she could as a house cleaner to keep afloat. “I can’t lock myself up in my room and just cry,” Martinez says.

Doubt, idiocracy, baseball, meals, and fish. Find out why these five stories stood out.

Gus Garcia-Roberts follows Belfi Rivera, a Major League Baseball prospect from the Dominican Republic, through an unregulated recruitment system that exposes young athletes to a network of predatory figures (and at least one former World Series MVP and prominent Fox Sports analyst). It’s a system that operates in plain sight and has for years, but Garcia-Roberts’s superbly reported narrative, which centers on Rivera and his vulnerable family, make those operations positively harrowing.

As a child, Belfi never cared for baseball. He started playing at 7, he told me, because a local coach would drag him from his house and cuff him on the head if he tried to escape to a nearby river to be with his friends. But even as a young boy, he understood the sport likely represented his family’s one shot out of grinding poverty. During that video call in 2021, it seemed that he had clinched it. 

But in two and a half years, the $1.8 million Belfi was promised would be almost all gone. Carmona received $630,000, which represented his 35% commission. But more than $950,000 went to someone who had no hand in teaching Belfi how to play baseball. His name is Santo Caraballo, one of the most notorious moneylenders profiting from Dominican baseball. His business partner is a national hero and, 10 years after his retirement, still a commanding figure within Major League Baseball: David Ortiz, known universally as “Big Papi.”

In late August, President Donald Trump announced what he called the “biggest oil deal in world history.” Since then, the full text of the accord — which grants the U.S. sweeping access to Venezuela’s oil reserves — has been one of the most sought-after secrets in Washington, DC.  ProPublica has reviewed a copy of the […]

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