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Federal officers detained three Juneau men for immigration enforcement and removed them from the community last year.

The Juneau Police Department says its knowledge of these incidents and its involvement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in Juneau is very limited. 

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Alaska Department of Corrections spokesperson Betsy Holley confirmed that three men were held at Lemon Creek Correctional Center in Juneau under federal charges for immigration detention purposes in 2025, and were then released to federal custody. They are no longer in Alaska’s correctional system.

Last May, one of the men was charged with driving without a license or insurance, according to Alaska court documents.

Juneau Police Deputy Chief Krag Campbell said his files say ICE officers detained the man. This happened in October without JPD knowledge or involvement. 

“During an unrelated investigation, JPD learned that one of the individuals had been deported by ICE,” Campbell said in an interview. 

Juneau police arrested one of the other men for driving under the influence in November. According to DOC, this man then went into federal custody, though Campbell said there is no record of immigration enforcement in JPD files.

Juneau police officers arrested the third man in December for a DUI. When officers later went to his residence and tried to serve a warrant, people there said he had been deported.

This is the first time police have confirmed immigration enforcement activity in Alaska’s capital city during the Trump Administration’s nationwide crackdown. As recently as Monday, Chief Derek Bos said he was not aware of any federal immigration activity in the area.

Holley said once the three men were in federal hands, DOC didn’t track what happened to them next. JPD doesn’t know where they are either. ICE has not responded to requests for more information. 

At Monday’s Juneau Assembly human resources committee meeting, Bos said federal agents are not required to notify local police of their activities.  

“In essence, they do not have to tell us if they’re doing anything in Juneau or not,” Bos said. “We have a great relationship with our federal partners, and so most of the time we do know if they’re coming or whatnot.”

He said the people he knew of that had been detained for immigration reasons had criminal records.

“By and large, all of those that I’m aware of, not to say there aren’t others, but that I’m aware of, who have been deported from our community have been convicted of crimes, and that has been the basis of why they’re leaving,” he said. “There may be exceptions, but I don’t know of those.” 

Nationwide, thousands of ICE officers have entered cities, going door to door to detain and deport people – some children, some with legal residency status. Protests have erupted, and last month, federal officers shot and killed two people in Minneapolis. 

Assembly member Maureen Hall said at the meeting that she has heard from residents about possible ICE activity in Juneau and that immigrants in the community are afraid. 

“Just from awareness of what’s happening all over the country, they are pretty terrified, so (they’re) reluctant to report minor fender benders or engage in any way,” she told Bos. “So if you have any suggestions on how we can help reassure them that Juneau Police Department is not ICE.”

Bos said Juneau residents can trust police to protect them.

“If you’re the victim of a crime, you have a lot of protections, and our job is to enforce those protections,” he said. “So especially as victims, we encourage people to still come to us and talk to us. We don’t have to report that you’re a victim to a crime and you’re illegal in the country. We don’t have to report that to ICE.”

That is, unless that person has a criminal detainer order, which is like a warrant from the federal government, Bos said.

“We do have certain requirements where we have to notify, you know, if there’s a person that we contact who’s on a criminal detainer, we have to notify them, and we do,” he said. “That’s federal law, so we follow that.” 

Campbell said there is no indication in police files that JPD alerted ICE about any of the three men who were detained. The files don’t mention immigration status, he said. 

He said people do have to comply with any orders from federal officers.

“Anytime you have law enforcement coming into town, whether they’re local, state or federal, they have a mandate,” he said. “You have to comply with it. Especially if they have things like warrants.”

KTOO requested records related to the three men from JPD, but has not yet received them.

Even though Juneau has not seen immigration enforcement like larger cities in the Lower 48 have, Assembly member Hall said in an interview that residents still need to be informed about what’s happening here.

“It gives the opportunity for those in the community that are involved in this to review our readiness to deal with potential full scale ICE activity,” she said.

As Alaska lawmakers reckon with a tight state budget and rising costs in the Department of Corrections, some are floating an uncomfortable idea: once again sending Alaska inmates out of state.

Over the last ten years, lawmakers have boosted the Department of Corrections’ budget by 70%, and even that hasn’t been enough.

Each of the past five years, the department has had to ask lawmakers for millions more — or tens of millions more — to make ends meet. This year, the department is requesting $24 million to cover unexpected costs in the current budget.

The department’s commissioner, Jen Winkelman, told the Senate Finance Committee earlier this month that she looked every day for ways to rearrange operations to avoid budget shortfalls or overruns. Health care for inmates and overtime to make up for short staffing are the two largest cost drivers, Winkelman said.

“It is consistently … a perfect storm,” Winkelman said.

Lawmakers went as far as to close one housing unit at the Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward last year in an effort to save money. But sometimes, Winkelman said, big expenses come up unexpectedly.

“Approximately two weeks ago, we had a large fight on the yard — 48 inmates involved in a fight,” Winkelman told a House committee on Tuesday. “Quick napkin math, we believe it to be just under $200,000 that that cost us.”

Five people were injured in the fight, and all are recovering, a department spokesperson said. But Winkelman said the cost-cutting move to close part of the prison may have played a role and ultimately resulted in a large unexpected cost.

“Those are just those anecdotal examples of the population and the complexity when we start overpopulating one area, what happens as a result due to the population we serve,” she said.

The spiraling costs have some lawmakers floating a return to a practice Alaska abandoned more than a decade ago: sending prisoners out of state to save money.

“We can’t keep going the direction we’ve been going the last few years,” said Sitka Republican Sen. Bert Stedman, a co-chair of the Finance Committee. “The operating budget is extremely strained with those items, and that’s what’s driving this discussion.”

Wasilla state Sen. Rob Yundt, a Republican in the minority, filed Senate Bill 126 last year, which if passed would direct the Department of Corrections to explore the idea to see if it saves money.

“Oftentimes we get to run legislation that we’re excited about,” Yundt said at a hearing on Tuesday. “There is none of that here.”

In the 1990s and 2000s, the state contracted with private prisons in Colorado and Arizona. By 2005, about a third of Alaska’s prisoners were held out of state in private facilities, according to news reports at the time.

One of those prisoners was Adam Barger, who spent more than a decade in out-of-state prisons after his conviction in Alaska in the 1990s. He returned in 2013 after the state opened the $240 million Goose Creek Correctional Center in the Mat-Su borough in an effort to bring Alaska’s prisoners home.

When he was transferred back, guards told him how much more difficult it was to manage prisoners who had been sent to Outside facilities than those who had not, Barger told lawmakers during public testimony on the bill.

“We were more violent, had gang affiliations, drug addictions, behavioral problems, and were more resistant to authority than those who had never been sent out of state,” Barger said. “Then, we were released back into the community.”

Some, like Barger, managed to leave the justice system behind them, he said. Barger said he earned a master’s degree and now lives in Arizona.

“For many, though, they were apt to get out and return to incarceration, often in conjunction with another charge,” Barger said. “They went back to their communities and created more victims because the behavioral issues they developed out of state had not been addressed or resolved prior to their release.”

Barger asked lawmakers to oppose Yundt’s bill.

Yundt’s bill would mandate that Alaska prisoners be kept separate from those from other states. It would also limit the prisoners that could be sent out of state to those with at least seven years left in their prison term, and Yundt said he’d like to see inmates brought back to Alaska as their release date approaches.

Sen. Löki Tobin, an Anchorage Democrat in the majority, said she sees other ways to reduce costs in the state’s prison system — like granting parole for people who are elderly, disabled or unlikely to reoffend.

Tobin said Alaska grants parole far less often than other states, and she blames the state’s parole board for keeping too many people behind bars.

“They’re engaging in double jeopardy,” Tobin said. “Folks who are up for discretionary parole, who are excellent candidates to re enter into their community safely with support, are being recommitted to incarceration.”

The parole board chair said last year that state law places strict limits on the board’s ability to grant parole.

The policy director of the Alaska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Mike Garvey, said that sending prisoners out of state would cut them off from family and friends in Alaska and make them more likely to reoffend.

“Moving prisoners out of state jeopardizes the constitutional rights of prisoners in Alaska, as well as presents public safety concerns,” Garvey said. “Alaska’s Constitution guarantees prisoners the right to rehabilitation, to due process, the right to counsel and the right to adequate medical care.”

Yundt said he was sympathetic to Barger and Garver’s concerns.

“I was once a young child that would travel to see family members as well on a Sunday, and so that’s not a great situation for anyone to be in,” he said. “I wish we weren’t in the situation, but here we are.”

Democratic Juneau Sen. Jesse Kiehl, a member of the powerful Finance Committee, said he understands the cost concerns, but he’s skeptical.

“I will just express a little concern about the notion of shipping Alaskans to warehouses outside,” Kiehl said. “We’ve done that in the past. The cleanup has been both expensive and ugly, and I don’t know that that’s a long term cost we want to bear.”

To realize any savings, Winkelman said, the department would likely need to close a facility. And that brings with it a whole host of thorny questions about jobs, local economies and public safety.

But with few options to control rising costs, and a governor resistant to standalone efforts to raise revenue, it may be a choice they’re forced to make, said Sen. Lyman Hoffman, a Bethel Democrat who co-chairs the Finance Committee.

“We have a limited budget. If we are not able to pass revenue measures, we have to look at doing something,” he said. “So this is an idea that is on the plate.”

Members of the House Transportation Committee slammed state transportation officials on Tuesday over a controversial ferry project that lawmakers said stands to benefit private interests but not ferry users themselves.

“The Alaska Marine Highway System was created for Alaskans — not for DOT — but for people and their usage. And you know, I don’t like to see you lose sight of that,” Rep. Louise Stutes, R-Kodiak, said during the hearing,

At issue is the Cascade Point ferry terminal project. The Alaska Department of Transportation signed a $28.5 million dollar contract over the summer to kickstart the effort, which aims to shorten the ferry route between Juneau, Haines and Skagway.

The project would entail building a ferry terminal 30 miles farther north of Juneau than the current one in Auke Bay. That means passengers would have to drive or use a shuttle service to travel between the remote terminal and town.

The contract ignited a wave of opposition from people in all three communities during a public comment period. During the hearing, Stutes noted that the vast majority of the more than 600 public comment letters opposed the project.

“92% of the people said, ‘We don’t want Cascade Point,'” Stutes said.

The pushback has largely centered around concerns that the new terminal would make regional travel less convenient and efficient – as opposed to more, as the state has argued. People have also argued the funds would be better spent on improving existing ferry service.

Christopher Goins is DOT’s southcoast region director. During the hearing, he acknowledged that the numbers Stutes cited are correct and that the project has sparked a lot of “fear” in the public.

But he added that the agency is taking public feedback seriously. He said that includes extending the original comment period and planning two additional rounds of public meetings in Haines, Skagway and Juneau.

“My staff is going to sit there, and we are going to listen to what people have to say, because we want them to be able to put that on the record,” Goins said. “That is fair and that is just. I think this project, of all the projects, needs that process.”

Goins acknowledged public concern over the state’s decision to move forward with the initial contract before soliciting feedback. Still, he said, the agency plans to go through the proper process.

“I think a lot of people got afraid because we hired a contractor to do a design-build process,” Goins said. “That doesn’t mean that the design, and the engineering, and the permitting, the consultation that comes with that process, is ignored. It is not.”

That answer didn’t appear to satisfy lawmakers.

“When you talk about there being controversy and welcoming the dialog, it doesn’t seem to jive with the fact that dollars are already dedicated towards this project,” said Committee Co-Chair Ashley Carrick, D-Fairbanks.

Lawmakers also grilled Goins and DOT Commissioner Ryan Anderson over concerns that the project stands to benefit private interests more than the communities that rely on the ferry system to get to Juneau for health care, groceries, air travel and more.

The new terminal is expected to benefit Grande Portage Resources’ proposed New Amalga Gold Project, which would likely use Cascade Point as its logistical base. But the terminal would also serve as a boon to Goldbelt Native Corporation, which owns the land.

“It feels very strongly to me like what’s really happening is Goldbelt is the primary beneficiary of a project the state is going to utilize federal dollars to support,” Carrick said.

Anderson, the agency’s commissioner, emphasized the importance of the private sector to the state’s economy and said working with industry can help promote economic development in Alaska.

Other lawmakers pressed agency officials over a controversial economic analysis of the project and about uncertainty around the new terminal’s overall cost and whether it would actually generate significant savings for the state.

Alaska Supreme Court Chief Justice Susan Carney highlighted efforts to reduce case backlogs and asked lawmakers to fund new judges and long-delayed courthouse maintenance during the annual State of the Judiciary address on Wednesday.

Carney pointed to a pair of December reports from the Anchorage Daily News, ProPublica and Bethel public radio station KYUK. They told the story of a man who spent seven years in jail awaiting trial for a murder he did not commit, and the victim’s family’s ongoing search for justice.

Carney is also the judicial branch’s chief administrator, and she says the reports remind the court system that it must remain committed to resolving cases quickly and fairly.

“I know that the cases with extreme delay are outliers compared to the vast majority of criminal cases and the time it takes to resolve them, but it’s still heartbreaking to think of the anguish that victims suffer and the problems that delays cause to everybody involved in criminal cases,” Carney said.

But the court system has made significant progress, Carney said. She said courts had cleared a pandemic backlog, with the number of open cases significantly below pre-pandemic levels. She said the number of felony cases more than two years old has been cut by more than half since 2023.

Carney thanked prior chief justices for their work bringing the backlog down, and she says she’s recently put out a new policy tightening existing limits on orders known as continuances, which delay court proceedings.

Carney also celebrated the rededication of the Utqiagvik Courthouse to honor an Indigenous legal pioneer. She called magistrate Sadie Brower Neakok a “trailblazer” and highlighted her commitment to ensuring language access for Indigenous people, starting before statehood.

“She regularly held court at her kitchen table and did it in Iñupiaq when the people appearing in front of her didn’t understand English,” Carney said. “When she became a state court magistrate, she and magistrate Nora Guinn from Bethel insisted that they be able to hold court in the language that their community members understood.”

Carney also came with requests. She asked lawmakers to open the state’s purse to fund a new judge in Palmer to handle the growing workload in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. The last time the state added a judge to the state’s fastest-growing region was in 2006, according to the court system, and in the meantime, the population has grown 40% and the number of cases filed has risen 55%.

Carney said the court system has tapped retired judges and those from other communities to fill in at the Palmer courthouse to handle criminal cases and other urgent matters, but she said she was concerned delays could mount in other areas without a new judge.

The chief justice also urged lawmakers to fund long-delayed maintenance. She says court facilities across the state are badly in need of repair, including an administrative building in Anchorage.

The building has a crumbling facade, “barely keeping out the elements and the occasional vermin,” she said.

“On the facade, close to head height, so that people passing by can see it, is a great big metal map of the state of Alaska,” Carney said. “I’m sorry to tell you, Kodiak is no longer part of the state of Alaska.”

Fortunately, Carney said the Kodiak-shaped hunk of metal did not land on any passing pedestrians. But she said the episode underscores the dire need to repair and upgrade courthouses.

Key lawmakers have said that despite a large deficit, they plan to prioritize school and state facility maintenance in this year’s budget.

A Juneau representative’s proposal to ban law enforcement officers from wearing face masks on duty got a chilly reception from some state lawmakers during its first hearing on Tuesday.

Rep. Sara Hannan, D-Juneau, prefiled House Bill 250 in early January ahead of the legislative session. In a presentation to the House State Affairs Committee, Hannan called her bill “pro-law enforcement.” She said it’s aimed at increasing police transparency and communication in Alaska. 

“Masked law enforcement is wrong on many levels,” she said. “When officers conceal their faces, they compromise transparency, communication and the public’s perception of accountability.”

Hannan’s bill comes in the wake of public outrage across the nation after a masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed a Minnesota woman on camera. Another man was killed by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer in Minneapolis just weeks later. 

The deaths drew heavy criticism. Minnesota and Congressional leaders pressed the Trump Administration over the facts and legality of actions by federal officers. That’s as protests over immigration enforcement have ramped up across the country. Rep. Andi Story, also D-Juneau, spoke about the unrest in Minnesota, which is her home state. 

“I think about the harm that’s happening, what we’re hearing about on the federal level now, when people are coming into communities,” she said. “It’s significant psychological harm that I have been hearing and reading about, and I think that’s what you’re trying to prevent in this bill for that happening here.”

Other states across the U.S. have sought to impose similar bans. On Monday, a federal court blocked enforcement of a law in California that sought to bar federal and local officers from wearing masks. The judge ruled it violated a federal doctrine that prohibits state laws from discriminating against the federal government — in this case, federal agents. 

However, Hannan’s bill, as drafted, would ban anyone acting as a law enforcement officer in Alaska from wearing a mask while on duty — including federal, state and local agents. The ban exempts medical masks, transparent safety shields, cold-weather masks or masks worn by undercover officers. 

An officer who violates the ban would be charged with a Class B misdemeanor per violation, which is punishable by up to 90 days in jail and a $2,000 fine. 

At Tuesday’s hearing, some lawmakers were skeptical.

“I’m seriously concerned about this bill,” said Rep. Kevin McCabe, R-Big Lake.

He argued that masks are a tool that can prevent attacks and doxxing of officers. He questioned whether the bill was necessary in Alaska. 

“I have never seen a masked officer that wasn’t on a snowmobile actually in Alaska,” McCabe said. “So I’m not sure that this is actually a problem, but I do think it is a tool.”

Hannan said ahead of this year’s legislative session that she saw the bill as a way to start a conversation about the issue. It’s unclear if it will have enough support to advance in the Legislature.

Students and school officials from across Alaska visited the Legislature — from the North Slope, to the Yukon Flats, to Yakutat and Hoonah — to make what has become an annual plea to lawmakers to invest in the state’s public education.

“I have been in this building every February for 20 years, and for 20 years I have been saying nearly the same exact thing, and we’re at a point now where that conversation is at an inflection point, ” said Lon Garrison, executive director of the Association of Alaska School Boards, which organizes the annual fly-in event on Monday.

“Pretty soon, public education will not work in the state of Alaska,” he said. “And we have to do something. We have to be bold.”

Decades of deferred maintenance for Alaska’s schools is reaching crisis levels, lawmakers heard, with some districts grappling with deteriorating school buildings, failing water and sewer systems.

Alaska’s school maintenance problems are well-known, but the schools’ needs come with a multi-million dollar price tag. Lawmakers will be negotiating how much to allocate to schools among a slate of other dire state funding needs, from transportation to increased disaster relief funding. That negotiation is further complicated by declining oil prices and state revenues — and the threat of Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto pen.

But on Monday, students and school board members, some parents themselves, shared emotional testimony of how schools continue to endure failing infrastructure.

“Some of our schools are so riddled with black mold that I developed a headache almost immediately,” said Julia Phelen, a member of the school board with the Delta-Greely School District, on visiting rural schools in the Delta Junction area district. “Some of them have only one working restroom in the entire building, and others are hauling water and using honey buckets.”

Last year, the Legislature approved $38 million to address school maintenance needs on the state’s major maintenance list, a ranking of school projects submitted to the state for reimbursement. That was enough to cover the top nine projects on the list. Gov. Dunleavy vetoed that down to roughly $12.8 million, citing declining oil prices and state revenues, to fund the top three projects on the list.

This year, whether lawmakers will allocate more funding for public education remains uncertain amid early budget negotiations.

But leaders in the bipartisan Senate Majority Caucus expressed support for addressing more of schools’ major facilities needs at a news conference on Tuesday.

“Now this year, we’ve got $401 million on the deferred maintenance list of schools,” said Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, a member of the Senate Finance Committee. “We need to have a dialogue with the administration and try to get them to work with us so we can, you know, slow down this deferred maintenance. Because every year doesn’t get addressed, it just gets worse.”

The deteriorating school facilities are coupled with stretched budgets — some districts face steep budget shortfalls and school closures — and rising costs, especially for rural districts. Some speakers said budget shortfalls are forcing districts to cut classes, teachers and activities, which they said is posing a growing risk to students’ safety and wellbeing, including mental health.

Reanna Brown, a school board member from Yakutat, testified that in rural communities like hers, which are connected to the road system only by boat and plane, the costs of education are higher, from retaining teachers to powering buildings and transporting supplies.

“Our students deserve the same opportunities as any student in Alaska, regardless of their zip code,” Brown said. “Stable, equitable education funding allows us to retain quality educators, support student services and provide safe, consistent learning environments.”

In the Yukon Flats School District, which covers a vast area in the northeast of the state, Rhonda Pitka, a school board member, said the decades of deferred maintenance is a constant problem.

“There’s always a problem with the sewer systems and the water systems,” Pitka said. “One of our smallest schools, Chalkyitsik, has about 13 students this year, but they’ve had this water issue for like, 20 years,” she said.

She said extreme cold and the remoteness of schools in the Interior is also exacerbating schools’ water and sewer issues.

“We have incredibly cold weather. It was 50 below for five weeks, and then it hit a three day streak of minus 70 below in the Interior. So, you know, at those temperatures, nothing’s running, nothing’s working,” Pitka said, and spoke about the difficulties of retaining essential maintenance workers in the villages at $20 per hour.

Many speakers thanked lawmakers for supporting the increase to the state’s per student funding, the base student allocation, last year, but said that state education funding still falls far short of what is needed.

“Every day we see the impact of not having enough resources for our education,” said Melina Pangiak, who testified with a classmate, Lucia Patrick, from the Chevak school in the Kashunamiut School District in Western Alaska.

The students spoke about the cuts to elective classes and learning opportunities. “Elective classes are more than just extra courses. They are where we discover what excites us and where we find talents and when we could discover our future paths,” Pangiak said.

“When these classes are cut or limited, it feels like doors are being closed on our potential,” Patrick added.

Students and school officials testified that there is a growing need for more school counselors and resources for mental health support.

“Our region recently experienced another suicide, which deeply affected our students and our only regional counselor,” said Kay Andrews, a school board member from the Southwest Region School District that includes eight schools spanning across the Bristol Bay region.

“Schools are more than our classrooms. They are community centers. They are safe places for our children, yet, schools are being asked to do more with less,” she said.

Some speakers pointed to bill proposals that lawmakers are considering this year as potential solutions. Some testified in support of House Bill 261, proposed this year by Rep. Andi Story, D-Juneau, that would redefine how districts calculate their student count to create more predictable budget estimates in the spring.

“It’s come to be a guessing game, almost, because we’re not sure how many students we’re going to have,” said Jack Strong, a board member from the Chatham School District, which serves four rural schools in Southeast Alaska. “It’s really hurting us in the long run, our children are not getting the education that they need, basically because of the way the paper shuffle is.”

Speakers also expressed support for state pension reform, House Bill 78, currently being debated in the House Finance Committee, to help support recruitment and retention of teachers.

Students came with solutions as well: Maddie Bass, a sophomore at Juneau Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé testified to the stress of teachers struggling with low pay, and leaving to pursue other jobs with health care benefits. Following the hearing, Bass said she’d like to see the state generate more tax revenue from the millions of tourists that visit Alaska each year.

“I’m seeing the government turning to taxing Alaskans. They want to tax Alaskans more instead of taxing corporations, and I think that that is the wrong idea,” Bass said. “I think to bolster the education system in Alaska, it would be a good idea to tax the tourism industry or cruise ships more, instead of putting a further burden on Alaskans that are just trying to work, learn and live here in the state.”