Four people detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Southcentral Alaska this week are being held at the Anchorage jail, according to the Alaska Department of Corrections.
The Anchorage jail detentions illustrate the scope of an enforcement action publicized by local FBI and regional DEA offices this week, a first sign that the administration of President Donald Trump’s national immigration crackdown has come to Alaska. But many details are still not clear.
On Monday, the Anchorage FBI and DEA posted photos on social media showing people being arrested, some in jail jumpsuits, as part of a joint immigration enforcement with ICE. The agencies did not answer questions about how many people were taken into custody, where they were taken into custody, or whether they were facing only immigration violations or criminal charges as well.
Alaska has no dedicated immigration detention facility, so ICE contracts with the state Department of Corrections to temporarily confine people until they are flown out of state, usually to the Tacoma, Washington, immigration detention facility, according to corrections spokesperson Betsy Holley. ICE pays the state $202.21 per day to house detainees. Usually, detainees are held for just a few days before leaving, she said.
Last year, the corrections department held 13 people for ICE. So far this year, the Department of Corrections has held six — the four currently incarcerated and two released to federal agents in late January, Holley said.
[Earlier coverage: FBI, DEA say they helped ICE with immigration enforcement in Alaska]
In geographically isolated and sparsely populated Alaska, immigration enforcement has not been aggressive in recent years, including during the first Trump administration, said Nicolas Olano, an attorney who focuses on immigration cases. There are signs that is changing.
While the numbers are small, in the first month or so of 2025, ICE has sent nearly half the people it did in all of 2024 to the Anchorage jail.
“It just shows that it’s increasing,” he said. “Is it going to continue this way? I don’t know.”
Two of the four people currently in ICE custody at the Anchorage Correctional Complex were first at the Mat-Su Pretrial Facility, suggesting they were picked up in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. The other two were taken directly to the Anchorage jail, the corrections department said.
Some of the people appeared in the FBI’s publicized photos in jail jumpsuits. All people detained by ICE go to Alaska jails and are dressed in jail garb. It’s not clear whether people picked up in Southcentral Alaska were taken in solely for alleged immigration violations or are facing other criminal charges as well.
Unlike state and federal criminal charges, immigration violations are not generally public.
ICE has said it is deporting “the worst first,” publicizing the names, criminal charges and alleged gang affiliations of people to its social media.
Of the four men detained, three did not appear to have any Alaska state or federal criminal record, based on a search of publicly available data. One of the men appeared to have been convicted in state court in 2010 with unsworn falsification. The man also pleaded guilty to a false claim of U.S. citizenship in 2010, a federal charge.
In the federal case, an affidavit signed by an immigration agent said that the man had admitted he crossed from Mexico to Texas around the year 2000, and had purchased a fake birth certificate he then used to start a life in Anchorage. He had used the fake name and identity to apply for a driver’s license, the affidavit said.
The man told the agents he’d been living in Anchorage for years at the time.
He would now be about 50 years old.
Olano, the immigration attorney, said rumors about ICE raids in Alaska are rampant — that agents will be showing up at a certain place or time. Remember, he said, law enforcement would never announce a raid beforehand.