Jessica Sunigaq Ullrich was at home last week waiting for a contractor to come fix her countertops when she heard yelling outside. She stepped out to see what was happening.
“I was definitely concerned,” Ullrich said. “And it wasn’t long after that I saw them walking this young man wearing a red hoodie towards a vehicle.”
The man Ullrich had hired is one of at least 56 people detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Alaska so far this year — more than the previous two years combined. There were a total of 13 ICE arrests in Alaska in 2024, while there were 20 in 2023, according to the Alaska Department of Corrections. The dramatic increase comes as the Trump administration intensifies its nationwide crackdown on immigration.
Wesley Early
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Alaska Public Media
Jessica Suniqag Ullrich recentely shared a video of an ICE arrest that occurred in front of her home on Oct. 3, 2025.
Some residents, like Ullrich, say the surge in arrests is deeply troubling and they’re stepping up to support detainees. Ullrich said while she had heard about ICE officers arresting people across the country, she was shocked to see a detention up close. She recorded it and posted the video to Facebook, where it was shared hundreds of times.
“It felt like I was watching a government-endorsed kidnapping, essentially,” Ullrich said. “And I couldn’t believe, I didn’t feel prepared for what I was witnessing in Anchorage, Alaska, in my neighborhood, in my front yard.”
Anchorage immigration attorney Nicholas Olano said he expects the number of ICE detentions in Alaska to balloon as the agency receives billions more in federal funding.
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“This is the horrible and sad truth is that those pickups and those arrests are following the law as it is written,” Olano said. “And if we are shocked by this, we need to change the law.”
In the meantime, he said there are ways people can support detainees including following Ullrich’s example by recording arrests.
“That’s great because we’re holding everybody accountable,” Olano said. “These officers, we’re making sure that they’re doing their job right, that they’re not pushing or abusing somebody.”
Olano said public advocacy is another way to garner support for detainees.
The day after Ullrich posted her video, she attended a shareholder meeting for the Bering Straits Regional Corporation. She told fellow shareholders about her concerns over the corporation’s investment in Global Precision Systems LLC, a company affiliated with several ICE detention centers in Texas and Arizona.
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“I felt compelled to share what I witnessed,” Ullrich said, “and to ask at the annual meeting that was scheduled for the very next morning if we as shareholders and whether the board of directors could consider divesting from companies like this that are profiting off of what feels like the torment of human beings.”
Ullrich said she wonders if the topic of Native corporations divesting from detention centers should be raised at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention next week.
“I’ve been informed there are multiple Alaska Native corporations that are connected with detention centers,” Ullrich said. “And that’s an issue, I feel like, in terms of that alignment with values and us ensuring that we’re not part of the harm of our Indigenous relatives from Central and South America.”
Wesley Early
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Alaska Public Media
Anchorage immigration attorney Nicolas Olano
Olano said financial support is another critical way to support detainees and their families. Since July, he has represented the family of Paola Guzman, a housecleaner who was detained by ICE in Anchorage and sent to a detention center in Tacoma, Wash. Guzman’s son, Aldo Coyotl, said his mother has lived in Alaska for more than 20 years and, one day in July, several cars barricaded her in as she parked, on her way to a cleaning job.
“Once you know it, all of them are around her,” Coyotl said. “And so she’s just in her car, terrified, and when they knock on her window, they show that they already have a court order and that they have her warrant for her arrest.”
Olano said Guzman did not have proper immigration documents. He said ordinarily, people who have been detained for entering the U.S. unlawfully would be able to post a bond to get released, but he ran into issues trying to pay Guzman’s bond.
“We ran into a new policy by the Tacoma immigration judges of denying bond for people who had crossed the border in the United States at any point,” Olano said. “This was something completely new.”
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Olano challenged the judge’s decision that Guzman couldn’t post her bond, and a court ruled in her favor last week. All the while, Olano said legal and other associated fees made the ordeal expensive.
“A call from the Tacoma Detention Center is $8 a minute,” Olanos said. “These rates are not even 1980s long distance rates. That’s absurd.”
Wesley Early
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Alaska Public Media
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Anchorage resident Rebecca Rogers started a GoFundMe to support the family of Paola Guzman after Guzman as detained by ICE officials in July.
In order to help support Guzman, her friend Rebecca Rogers started a GoFundMe to help cover some of those fees. Rogers has known Guzman for more than 20 years, and said she’s a valuable community member.
“She was a hockey mom, a school mom, involved in her church,” Rogers said. “And I just grew to care for her very much.”
Rogers said she hopes that residents realize the hardships their fellow community members are going through.
“I think if people are paying attention, they realize that the people we care about, many of them who may not have their paperwork in place, are just vulnerable to a pretty vindictive, kind of crazy, insane system,” she said
The $16,000 raised in the online fundraiser, in part, helped to cover Guzman’s legal fees and bond.
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Guzman was reunited with her family in Anchorage this week. Olano said Guzman will still have to appear before an immigration judge to hear her case, and he expects the process will take years.
The first Jesuit missionaries in Alaska sailed up the Yukon River in 1887. By the turn of the 20th century, the religious order of the Catholic Church had as many as 50 Jesuits in the state.
Now, only two remain. And by the end of June, there will be none.
The Jesuits’ nearly 140 years in the state was honored at an event at Bethel’s Immaculate Conception Church on June 16. A procession of priests wearing long white gowns with red hems walked down the aisle to open the event. The Bishop of the Diocese of Fairbanks, Stephen Maekawa, thumped the ground with a shimmering silver staff known as a clozier as he approached the altar.
Bishop of the Diocese of Fairbanks, Steven Maekawa, walks toward the altar at the Immaculate Conception Church in Bethel.
“My brothers and sisters, we gather together to celebrate this wonderful and blessed occasion to acknowledge the love of God and the work of God through the 139 year mission of the Society of Jesus of the Jesuit fathers,” Maekawa said to open the event.
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A traditional Catholic mass followed, with readings in both English and Yup’ik. During the sermon, Maekawa acknowledged the vastness of the Fairbanks diocese, and the tremendous amount of work done by the Jesuits to establish it.
“All of the 46 churches of the Diocese of Fairbanks that we currently have were established by either the Jesuit fathers or by direction of a Jesuit bishop,” Maekawa said. “We have a long history of the Society of Jesus’ presence and ministry here in all of Alaska.”
The Jesuits are an order within the Catholic Church, akin to the Dominicans or Franciscans. They have a reputation for taking on some of the Catholic Church’s most remote assignments.
That missionary spirit brought the Jesuits to the Yukon River in 1887, where they built churches, schools, and ministries. Without their work, Catholicism may not have taken root in huge swaths of Alaska, particularly among Alaska Native communities.
The Immaculate Conception Church in Bethel.
But the Jesuits leave a complicated legacy. Their methods of converting Native people to the religion, particularly in the first half of the 20th century, created generational traumas still felt to this day.
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Fr. Sean Carroll is the provincial of the Jesuits West Province, which oversees Alaska and nine other states.
Fr. Sean Carroll, provincial of the Jesuits West Province, speaks at an event recognizing nearly 140 years of Jesuit service in Alaska.
“Thank you for all that you have taught us about who Jesus is and how to love and serve Him wholeheartedly,” Carroll said. “I also thank you for your patience with us. For there have been times when we have sinned and when we have hurt you.”
Missionaries, including the Jesuits, forcefully converted and assimilated Alaska Native people into Western culture and religion. Students at Jesuit-run boarding schools were forced to abandon their Native languages and physically punished when caught speaking languages other than English. Native dancing and drumming were also banned.
The Jesuits West Province maintains a list of 150 Jesuits with credible claims of sexual abuse against minors or vulnerable adults. A quarter of the accused Jesuits served in Alaska at some point in time.
“I ask for your forgiveness for all that we have done that was not rooted in Christ and love for Him, and for when we did not value your culture nor recognize the presence of God in you,” Carroll said.
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Carroll gave the order to withdraw from the state last spring. A big issue was the recruitment of Jesuits willing to travel and serve in remote villages. He told the congregation that the Jesuits’ work would continue, just without a permanent presence.
Fr. Rich Magner, one of the two remaining Jesuit priests in Alaska, attends a ceremony in Bethel.
Fr. Rich Magner is one of the two remaining Jesuit priests in Alaska. His last day serving Chevak, Hooper Bay, and Scammon Bay is June 30.
“We all always knew coming in, or should have known, that we’re not going to be here forever. It’s going to be mission accomplished at some point,” Magner said. “And then we hand it off to the diocese that we’ve helped create, and so that’s a good feeling.”
Magner’s next stop is a Clinical Pastoral Education residency in Tacoma, Washington.
The other remaining priest, Fr. Tom Provinsal, first came to Alaska in 1968 to teach. A fond memory, he said, was meeting Elders that practiced traditional subsistence lifestyles.
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“Some of the grandmothers, their fingers were just all bent with arthritis and stuff like that, you know, their whole lives they’ve been working out in the cold and the wet, doing food, sewing, all that kind of stuff,” Provinsal said. “I’d say I just feel very privileged to have come when I did come and to see that.”
Provinsal returned in 1975 as a priest and has served in the region ever since. After moving away, he plans to take a five month sabbatical. What happens next, he said, is in God’s hands.
Two lines formed in the aisle for communion at the end of the mass. After taking communion, Bethel’s Parish Administrator Susan Murphy gave a final thank you.
“It’s difficult to say goodbye to people who have been a part of our lives for so long,” Murphy said. “We know that you have done what was yours to do, and have taught us to do what is ours to do. We are grateful.”
Jesuit priests form a row along the altar of Bethel’s Immaculate Conception Church as members of the congregation lift their arms and pray.
Dominic Hunt, a Yup’ik deacon that flew in from Emmonak for the event, led the congregation through a final prayer.
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“Bless them with your wisdom, that they may be a word of hope, a world in need. We ask this through Christ, our Lord. Amen,” Hunt said.
About 70 people posed for a photo on the altar – priests, deacons, parishioners, Elders and children — many of them smiling, some standing quietly.
The photo doesn’t tell the whole story. But it’s a moment when gratitude, grief, and memory all shared the same room.
Bishop of the Diocese of Fairbanks, Steven Maekawa, stands in the middle of a crowd waiting to take a photo at Bethel’s Immaculate Conception Church.
JUNEAU, Alaska (KTUU) – The Supreme Court of Alaska will be taking up the case of the State of Alaska, Division of Elections v. Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr.
The oral arguments will be held Monday at 10 a.m. via Zoom, according to an order and opening notice.
The document also specifies that a decision is expected to be made before noon on Tuesday.
According to documents from the Division of Elections, the state must start printing ballots at noon on the same day.
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This comes after an Anchorage Superior Court Judge ordered Dan J. Sullivan on to the ballot Friday.
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