JUNEAU – The Alaska House Judiciary Committee held a hearing Monday to examine actions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the wake of the ICE arrest and deportation of a Soldotna mother and her children last week.

Committee Chair Andrew Gray, an Anchorage Democrat, said lawmakers want to understand ICE officials’ decision to detain and swiftly deport Sonia Espinoza Arriaga and her children after Espinoza Arriaga missed a recent court date in her asylum case.

Immigration rights experts said that Espinoza Arriaga’s case indicates a shift in ICE tactics in Alaska. 

“I’ve never seen a child arrested in Alaska before, until what happened in Soldotna,” said Anna Taylor, who directs the Alaska Institute for Justice, the only Alaska agency that offers low-cost immigration legal services.  

Taylor said President Donald Trump’s immigration policies are affecting her clients in Alaska. 

“Cases that were closed are being reopened and denied,” and people are being put into deportation proceedings, Taylor said. “Overall, we are having fewer options and more administrative barriers when we’re trying to help people.”

The judiciary committee invited personnel with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and ICE, which is an arm of DHS, to attend Monday’s hearing to share information about its immigration enforcement policies and actions in Alaska. 

But ICE and DHS personnel informed Gray by email that they would not attend the hearing; Gray set a Friday deadline for written responses to lawmakers’ questions from personnel with both ICE and DHS.  

In a statement given to news organizations on Monday, an ICE spokesperson defended last week’s arrest of Espinoza Arriaga, a McDonald’s employee who’d recently married a U.S. citizen, and her three kids ages 18, 16 and 5. 

ICE deported Espinoza Arriaga and the two younger children to Jalisco state in Mexico; Arriaga’s eldest son Alexis was transferred Friday from a state facility to the Northwest Detention Center, a privately-run ICE detention facility in Tacoma.

Alaska Department of Corrections officials told the committee about the department’s involvement with ICE operations in Alaska, as a signee to an agreement delegating federal immigration enforcement authority to the state corrections agency.

Alaska DOC Commissioner Jen Winkelman said that the department contracts with the federal government to detain federal prisoners, including ICE detainees who are not criminals.

“So what will happen is, when the ICE agents detain somebody, they will bring them to us, the individual, and a piece of paper that essentially authorizes us to hold them,” Winkelman said, noting that the state usually holds individuals for about 72 hours before federal agents move them.

Other DOC officials said that the federal government reimburses the state for the cost of holding the detainees, and that state facilities detain federal holds in separate areas from criminal prisoners. 

ICE signed its agreement in 2020 with the state DOC, which operates a dozen corrections facilities across Alaska. The two in Southeast are the Ketchikan Correctional Center and the Lemon Creek Correctional Center in Juneau. 

Kodiak Police Department signed a similar agreement in 2020; no other entities in Alaska have active agreements with ICE. In the past year, ICE has expanded the number of such agreements it maintains with local and state agencies in the U.S.

The Sitka Police Department has not considered, and is not considering, entering into an agreement with ICE, Chief Chad Goeden said in a phone call with the Sentinel today.

Regarding the potential for ICE activity or presence in Sitka, Goeden said that SPD is “not worried about this problem until we have evidence that there is a problem.”

In early March of 2025, ICE personnel came to Sitka to enforce restrictions on visas. A federal immigration official reported that ICE arrested one man, Ciprano Guerrero, who was illegally present in the U.S., and pled guilty in Sitka in 2024 to a felony charge of driving under the influence. 

That was before Goeden came on as interim police chief. Goeden said that SPD personnel have informed him that “DHS was here in the spring of 2025.”

“They used our office to make some phone calls and they asked for directions,” Goeden said.  He said police department personnel were not involved with DHS operations in Sitka.

While acknowledging that DHS conducted operations in Sitka last year, Goeden said that “we have more probable things to worry about.”

“I’m not trying to minimize what has happened elsewhere, but from a practical point of view, it’s pretty unlikely that they’re going to come back,” Goeden said.

An Alaska Department of Public Safety official said in Monday’s hearing that the DPS does not coordinate with ICE. 

In other witness testimony, faith leaders said ICE agents’ actions in Alaska last week raise grave moral concerns because the actions seem to lack due care for children and minors. They said the actions caused community trauma, are contributing to an environment of fear and could prejudice people’s perception of law enforcement in general.  

Also testifying Monday was the mother of a kindergarten classmate of Espinoza Arriaga’s 5-year-old, Matias.

“He was flourishing,” the parent said, before discussing how the news of Matias’ detention and deportation caused great distress among his kindergarten classmates and their families. 

Experts in Monday’s hearing said that while the deportation of immigrants, including women and children, is by no means a new policy for the U.S., immigration enforcement has taken a new shape this past year due to a massive expansion of the ICE agency budget under President Trump. 

Elora Mukherjee, an immigration rights expert with Columbia University, told the House committee that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act allocated an additional $45 billion to expand the U.S. detention system over the next four years. 

Mukherjee said that from January to October of 2025, at least 3,800 children under the age of 18, including 20 infants, were detained by U.S. immigration authorities. She spoke of poor conditions and myriad health risks for children detained in federal facilities. 

Detaining people comes at great cost to the U.S. government.

“A news release from ICE in 2022 stated that alternatives to a detention program cost less than $8 per day versus the cost of detention, which at that time, was approximately $150 per day” per individual, Mukherjee said. In 2016, it cost the U.S. government more than $900 per day to detain one immigrant parent with two children, she said.

Lawmakers asked Mukherjee how state legislatures can work to guide the actions of ICE officials in their states. 

Mukherjee responded that “holding a hearing like this is vitally important in sending a message of what is permissible in Alaska and what you will not permit to happen in your state.”

She noted that  New Mexico recently passed a law that has been signed by the governor that bans local law enforcement agencies from entering into agreements with ICE and seeks to block ICE from opening new facilities in the state.

In closing comments, Gray said the House Judiciary Committee will be drafting a resolution outlining the actions it believes the federal government should take. 

“I can’t look away and I know that most Alaskans can’t look away either,” Gray said.

This story as originally published by the Daily Sitka Sentinel