State Government

The Alaska Department of Corrections, which handles the state’s jails and prisons, has taken in 40 people who were detained outside of the state by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The move comes amid a national crackdown on immigration by the Trump administration.

In a statement, Alaska Deputy DOC Commissioner April Wilkerson said all 40 of the detainees are men, and they were taken in under an “existing contract for federal detainees.” Wilkerson said the state is being reimbursed $223.70 per man per day, and DOC anticipates the men will be held in the state for about a month. She said the state’s prison population is at about 83 percent bed capacity, as of Monday.

Wilkerson declined to answer additional questions, including what facilities the men are being held at, and where they were originally detained.

Anchorage-based immigration attorney Nicolas Olano called the move “unusual” and said he hasn’t seen transfers like this in his decade as a lawyer in Alaska.

“This is like sending people, I think, almost like trying to send them to El Salvador, to somewhere far remote,” Olano said. “And it’s just the same idea of punishing the immigrant and punishing their families and creating fear and distress upon everybody.”

Olano said he’s been made aware that at least some of the detainees are being held at the Anchorage Correctional Complex. He said conditions are “very poor” at the Alaska facilities, and detainees aren’t able to leave their cell for very long or go outside.

“The food is terrible, and the medical attention is subpar,” Olano said, comparing conditions in Alaska to the next closest ICE facility in Washington. “This is different, and I’m not saying that it’s a great camp, but my understanding of what the clients have told me, the treatment, the food, the space in the facilities, are much better in Tacoma.”

Olano said Alaska also has a shortage of interpreters. He said he’s been contacted by the attorney of one of the detainees who was moved to Alaska, but as of Monday afternoon he was not representing any of the 40 men.

“I’m going to find out what we can do for him, try to get in contact with these other people and just pass out the information that we are going to try to help and see what we can do,” Olano said.

A regional spokesman for ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment. As of the end of May, 11 people in Alaska have been detained by ICE officials.

The Alaska Board of Education unanimously approved new reading standards for Alaska Native languages Wednesday. This means students from kindergarten to third grade can have their reading skills evaluated in an Alaska Native language instead of in English.

The new standards are broader than the state’s current reading standards. This allows schools to fit the standards to their cultural and linguistic needs.

The standards recognize students can achieve literacy in state languages other than English.

Jamie Shanley is the assistant director of education with Sealaska Heritage Institute, a nonprofit tribal organization that helped create the standards last year. She said the standards give students learning an Alaska Native language another option to meet reading requirements set by the Alaska Reads Act. But it was a challenge to create the standards.

“That was a really hard clashing of two worlds, a Western ideal of education with this standards based system and an indigenous worldview,” she said. “And so this group really has [a] beautiful way of meshing those two things.”

She said the standards aren’t meant to dictate reading in one of the state’s 23 official Alaska Native languages in a confined way.

The standards also define reading differently. Shgen George is one of the owners of Teaching Indigenous Design for Every Student, an education consulting group. She said Alaska Native cultures do read, even if there wasn’t historically a written language.

“Reading is looking at things and gathering information.,” George said. “And so we really talked a lot about how we have been reading things this whole time. And so we really had these deep discussions about reading the weather and reading our environment and reading our regalia and our art.”

There are Alaska Native language programs and schools all around the state, including the Tlingit Culture, Language and Literacy school in Juneau.

Several educators from TCLL helped to form the standards. Principal Molly Yerkes said the school already uses elements of the new standards and that they will help schools take the next steps to develop ways to assess reading in Alaska Native languages.

“In Alaska, every community has to develop their own,” Yerkes said. “It’s not like something you can buy in Texas and McDougal Littell, so I think this adoption of these standards will support the creation of quality materials and also hopefully lead to a support for more native speakers of indigenous languages to become teachers.”

She said the TCLL staff are working with researchers to develop assessments for Lingít learners.

Per Alaska Administrative Code, regulations typically take effect 30 days after they are filed by the Lieutenant Governor.

The legislative session ended last month, but tension persists between the governor and state lawmakers.

In late May, legislative leaders sent Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy a letter criticizing the Department of Revenue for, as the letter put it, obstructing the Legislature’s access to information on oil and gas taxes. Specifically, lawmakers have been trying to figure out if the state is getting the tax money it is owed.

According to the Anchorage Daily News, the last such review covered a time period from 2006 to 2011 and found the state was owed more than a billion dollars in taxes.

That review was in 2018. Dunleavy has been governor since then, and the administration has refused to give legislators the same information that previous administrations gave up willingly.

ADN reporter Iris Samuels wrote about the letter and says it’s just the latest chapter in a long-running saga spanning pretty much the entire Dunleavy administration.

Below is the transcript of an interview with Samuels on Alaska News Nightly. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Iris Samuels: These numbers are pretty basic, and what the legislative auditor has said is, if the Department of Revenue is not collecting this information in this particular easily digestible form, that in itself is cause for concern, because we should really know, pretty offhand, pretty easily, how much the state is assessing in extra taxes every year.

Casey Grove: Right. So, I mean, there’s this letter, but then this past practice of the Department of Revenue willingly providing this information to the Legislature is also now the subject of a bill that seeks to compel the administration to do that. And I guess part of this is also that those legislators are concerned that the governor might veto that bill, right?

IS: Right. So lawmakers basically got together this year and passed this bill that is meant to underscore existing powers that the state, that the legislative auditor has. So it’s really not giving the legislative auditor new powers. It’s just a bill that says these are the authorities of the legislative auditor, whose role is defined in the state Constitution, and basically asking in a new form, the administration of the governor, to comply with requests that come from the legislative auditor.

And then going to this letter, the letter accompanied the bill. And so the goal there from the House Speaker and the Senate President was to send a message to the governor, who is no stranger to the veto pen, “Hey, please don’t veto this particular piece of legislation.”

CG: Tell me more about the extraordinary nature of that, because I think, you know, some people might look at it and say, “OK, well, they sent him a letter. So what? It’s just a letter.” But that’s actually pretty rare for this kind of a circumstance, right?

IS: Yeah, to be fair, I haven’t been covering the Legislature for that long, but I’ve never heard of the presiding officers sending a letter directly to the governor to accompany a piece of legislation. And what this letter says is basically that this goes to the very heart of state government in Alaska, and this idea that we have a legislative branch, we have an administration, and they should really be working together for the benefit of the people of Alaska, not working as sort of opposing sides.

So it remains to be seen. He could actually, you know, take the letter to heart. And we really don’t know what’s behind all this. Again, in theory, the gravest concern is that the state has been leaving some money on the table, that it could be collecting from oil and gas companies in taxes. But we don’t know if that’s the case. Maybe the state is actually performing the audits as it has in the past. It’s collecting all this extra revenue, and we just don’t know.

CG: I guess, I mean, we also don’t know why, right? Speaking of Gary Stevens, Senate President Gary Stevens, his quote in your story was something about, you know, “We don’t know if this is incompetence, or, you know, these folks are incapable of doing this work.”

What do you think about that? I mean, have you gotten any indications that it’s just, it’s too much of a burden to put this together, people are not doing their jobs, or is the information actually being, like, withheld for some reason?

IS: I reached out to the Department of Revenue with questions for this story, and I did not get a response. But one thing that is worth pointing out is that several pretty high-up officials within the Department of Revenue have left under the tenure of the current Commissioner of Revenue, and that’s Adam Crum.

Adam Crum is actually the third Revenue Commissioner under Gov. Dunleavy. He really has not spoken publicly about this. He was invited to address a legislative committee hearing when the Legislature was still in session, and he didn’t show up, and that caused a lot of House members who were in that committee to be quite upset. The legislative leaders really were wanting to hear directly from the source about what was behind all of this, again, under the assumption that potentially there is a perfectly reasonable explanation.

CG: Which we’re still waiting to hear, right?

IS: Right.

CG: So where does this go from here? We’re just sort of on a veto watch?

IS: Yeah, I think we’ll wait to see what happens with this piece of legislation, and then, regardless of what happens, we’re still waiting for the results of this audit. We still, we really just want to know, bottom line, is the state collecting the tax revenue that it is owed?

Update 6/3/25 5:06 p.m:

On Tuesday afternoon, the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development released documents updating the status of the proposed regulation. Now the board must decide whether to adopt it as an emergency regulation, or to open the 30-day comment period for the proposed change.

An emergency regulation means the board could approve the change without a public comment period. It would take effect immediately after approval from the state’s lieutenant governor.

If approved as an emergency regulation, the change would last only 120 days unless the board later approved a permanent regulation change.

The board may also consider the regulation without emergency status and open a 30-day public comment period before taking action.

Original story:

The Alaska State Board of Education is considering a regulation change that would further limit how much money local governments can give to school districts. At its regularly scheduled meeting on Wednesday the board will decide whether to open a 30-day comment period for the proposed change before deciding on approval at a later meeting.

The new regulation would narrow the definition of what kind of spending counts as a local contribution. State law currently limits how much municipalities can give to districts. 

Several school districts interpret the limit to apply only to money for instructional services. Some municipalities like the City and Borough of Juneau give additional money to their school districts for non-instructional services like transportation and preschool. The regulation change would end this practice.

If the regulation is approved, the Juneau School District would need to cut more than $2 million in funding for student activities, food services, after-school child care and more.

Leadership from the Alaska Council of School Administrators said in an email to KTOO the change could affect districts that represent nearly half of the state’s students.

The Alaska Department of Education and Early Development, or DEED, drafted a version of the change last November. DEED wrote in a memo to the board that it’s proposing the change to match federal definitions and to remain in compliance with a yearly federal disparity test.

The non-instructional local contributions haven’t been considered in the test. Alexei Painter, one of the state’s legislative fiscal analysts, told KTOO it also wasn’t included in this year’s test, which the state failed.

DEED officials didn’t respond to questions from KTOO Tuesday.

The board will decide whether to open a 30 day public comment period during its business meeting tomorrow. DEED has requested the board include the regulation change at a special meeting in July if the board opens public comment this week.

There is also an opportunity for the public to comment on agenda items early Wednesday morning at 8:25 during the virtual board meeting. Meeting information can be found on the board’s website.

The three pieces of legislation that make up Alaska’s annual state budget are on Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s desk.

According to legislative records, the state’s operating, capital and mental health budgets were transmitted to the governor on Tuesday, giving the governor until June 19 to veto the bills or sign them into law.

The governor has the ability to use a line item veto to reduce or eliminate specific items within the budget, and Dunleavy has previously indicated that he may reduce funding for public schools below the amount prescribed by a formula in state law.

State legislators voted to raise that formula in the session’s last days, overriding Dunleavy’s decision to veto the bill containing a $700 increase to the base student allocation, the core of the state’s school funding formula.

If Dunleavy reduces education funding below what’s called for by the formula, it would be unprecedented and akin to former Gov. Bill Walker’s decision in 2016 to veto part of the Permanent Fund dividend: Since the education funding formula was created, every governor has followed the law.

Two policy bills also were transmitted to the governor on Tuesday.

The first, House Bill 75, cleans up some state laws pertaining to the Permanent Fund dividend and was uncontroversial in the House and Senate. The second, Senate Bill 183, would require the executive branch to deliver reports in the form requested by the Alaska Legislature’s auditor.

Under the Alaska Constitution, the Alaska Legislature has audit authority over the executive branch, but since 2019, lawmakers have been unable to analyze the performance of the section of the Alaska Department of Revenue that audits tax settlements with large oil companies.

Lawmakers say the Department of Revenue has switched policies and no longer provides a report that once allowed them to examine the section’s work.

Members of the department testified that they have turned over raw data, but the legislative auditor testified that her department lacks the information and capability to turn that data into actionable information on the state’s oil revenue.

The bill was transmitted to the governor’s office with a letter from the Speaker of the House Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham and Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, asking Dunleavy not to veto it.

“This letter accompanies the bill not as a routine legislative communication, but as a reflection of the extraordinary nature of the circumstances we face,” it read. “The ongoing obstructions by the DOR must not be allowed to become a precedent for future administrations. We must reinforce, not erode, the norms of oversight and accountability that are vital to Alaska’s republican form of government.”

If Dunleavy does veto a bill, the Alaska Legislature is not expected to consider an override until January, when lawmakers reconvene in regular session.

A state judge has extended a restraining order that bars the Alaska Department of Fish and Game from killing bears in a controversial predator-control program.

Superior Court Judge Christina Rankin, in an order issued late Monday, said the department’s decision to shoot bears earlier this month in violation of a previous court ruling justified her decision to keep the temporary restraining order in place beyond the 10 days that is standard in Alaska law.

The department will be prohibited from conducting its planned bear cull in the Mulchatna caribou herd range until it corrects the legal flaws identified in a March 14 ruling issued by a different judge, Rankin said.

She rejected the state’s request to lift the restraining order and its argument that the prohibition was no longer needed.

“Despite the State’s stated intention of discontinuing its bear predator control measures this season, due to its prior position that it would continue bear abatement unless specifically enjoined, this Court thinks it is prudent to specifically state that the TRO will not expire after ten days and extends the TRO until further order of the Court or until the State obtains proper legal authority, consistent with the March 14 Order, and the May 7, 2025 Order,” she said in her order.

It is the latest development in a lawsuit filed in 2023 by the Alaska Wildlife Alliance that challenged the predator control program.

State officials say the program is needed to boost Mulchatna caribou herd numbers, and it must be conducted in spring and early summer, when newborn caribou calves are vulnerable to bear predation. But the Alaska Wildlife Alliance and other critics say the program lacks scientific validity and was put into place without proper public input.

Superior Court Judge Andrew Guidi ruled on March 14 that the department and the Alaska Board of Game had violated state constitutional requirements when approving and starting the program. He agreed with the Alaska Wildlife Alliance’s argument that public notice and opportunity for public input was inadequate. He also found that state officials violated the constitution’s mandate that replenishable resources be maintained for sustained yield, by failing to properly analyze the program’s impact on bear populations.

After Guidi’s ruling, and after Rankin ruled on May 7 that a Board of Game emergency regulation allowing the program to resume was legally void, the department restarted the bear culls on May 10 anyway.

Eleven brown bears and one wolf were killed that weekend, the department said. That toll added to the 175 brown bears, five black bears and 19 wolves that the state said were killed during 2023 and 2024.

That weekend action led to Rankin’s determination that the state had acted in “bad faith” and her decision to impose the temporary restraining order.

The Alaska Wildlife Alliance has also served notice that it may ask for the department to be held in civil contempt for its bear kills earlier in the month.

The Mulchatna caribou herd numbers about 15,000 animals, after hitting a peak size of about 200,000 in the 1990s, according to the department. The department’s goal is to have the herd expand to between 30,000 and 80,000 animals, big enough to support a hunt. Hunting of that caribou herd was closed in 2021.