In the past week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have detained two men in Alaska. At least one will be deported back to Peru, according to his wife, who is an Anchorage resident and U.S. citizen.

The recent ICE arrests in Alaska — totaling at least 11 since January 2025, according to state Department of Corrections statistics — paint a picture of what local immigration attorneys are calling a “shocking” uptick under a presidential administration that’s working toward its quota of deporting 1 million immigrants. Not yet halfway through the year, ICE has detained almost the same number of people — and placed them in Alaska jails before sending them to detention centers out of state — as it did in all of 2024, according to state data.

But that number doesn’t account for all ICE arrests, said Alaska immigration attorney Margaret Stock. Some detainees are flown directly out of state, and thus are not counted by the Department of Corrections, which contracts with ICE to temporarily house detainees. A spokesperson from ICE said they could not answer specific questions about total arrests in Alaska this year.

The wife of one of the detained men says in the wake of the arrest, she’s spent hours on the phone fighting for information about her loved one from both state and federal officials.

In an interview Thursday, Paola Jimenez, 30, said she was just settling into her work at an Anchorage dermatology office last Friday morning when her husband, 32-year-old Cristian Ibanez Velasquez, called her. He’d just dropped her off 30 minutes beforehand.

She picked up like normal. “He said: ‘I got detained. It’s with ICE,’” Jimenez said in an interview nearly a week later. “‘I’m in handcuffs. They want to talk to you.’” Ibanez Velasquez, from Peru, only speaks Spanish, and the ICE officer arresting him didn’t have an interpreter when they handcuffed him in the couple’s driveway.

An ICE officer told Jimenez the news: Her husband was being detained — or effectively arrested — and would be held at the Anchorage Correctional Complex. He would be taken to the nearest ICE detention facility in Tacoma, Washington, she was told, where he’d be deported by plane to his home country of Peru.

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Ibanez Velasquez entered the United States through Arizona illegally in 2022, but was in regular contact with immigration officials about his whereabouts ever since, his wife said. He reported changes in address — first to Chicago, and then Anchorage — and uploaded weekly photos of himself through a federal application that monitored his whereabouts, according to Jimenez. He doesn’t appear to have a state or federal criminal record, based on a search of publicly available data.

In Peru, Jimenez said her husband was a motorcycle mechanic. He came to the United States to seek better opportunities, she said.

But a missed a court appearance in New York in 2023 ultimately led to an order for removal that year, which Jimenez said her husband was unaware of. Local immigration attorney Nicolas Olano, who Jimenez contacted for help, broke the news when he looked up Ibanez Velasquez‘s immigration case using the Peruvian’s Alien Registration Number assigned by the Department of Homeland Security. At that point, with a deportation order and a missed court appearance, Olano said there wasn’t much he could do.

The couple’s situation was first reported by Alaska Public Media.

Jimenez questions why ICE officials didn’t notify her husband of his deportation order sooner.

“That same (ICE) officer that was doing his check-ins, was the same officer that detained him,” Jimenez said. “So if there was an order for removal back then, why did no one ever say anything to him?”

The couple met in 2023, and married in fall 2024. Jimenez, who is a dual citizen of the United States and Mexico, said that financial constraints kept them from getting a lawyer to help get her husband the proper paperwork.

Now, her greatest wish is for her husband’s safe and swift delivery to his country, where she plans to eventually meet him.

“The only thing that we want right now is for him to go back home to Peru,” she said. “I would love it if he could stay here, but it’s not going to happen.”

Over the last week, Jimenez has visited her husband at the Anchorage Correctional Complex several times. She said he was wearing a yellow jumpsuit, and they spoke through a glass panel. He complained about a lack of interpretation service at the jail, she said, which prevented him from getting medication. “He said, ‘Nobody tells me anything here.’”

Asked about legal obligations for language interpretations and medication access, Alaska Department of Law spokeswoman Patty Sullivan said, “DOC provides the same level of care for federal inmates and detainees that it does for state inmates. This includes medical care and translation services, as needed.”

On Thursday morning, an online detainee locator showed Ibanez Velasquez was in Anchorage, his wife said.

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A spokesperson for the Department of Corrections confirmed that both detainees were out of their custody as of Thursday evening. The other man, identified as Leobardo Cardona-Rivas, a Mexican citizen, was detained May 25, according to department spokesperson Betsy Holley.

By Friday afternoon, Jimenez said her husband’s online detainee locator showed he arrived in Tacoma. She hadn’t heard from him yet that day.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Jimenez said, choking up.

In Anchorage, the couple loved to go to La Michoacana for treats, take drives to Wasilla, go on dates to Texas Roadhouse, stay home and watch TV with their two cats, and fulfill InstaCart delivery orders together.

Now, Jimenez said, she comes home from work to an empty house, and doesn’t know when she’ll next see — or hear from — her husband.

“When he gets sent to Peru, then I am going to go right behind him,” she said. “Because, well, he’s my husband.”

A hiker in Alaska miraculously survived after he was trapped facedown in a frigid creek for three hours under a massive boulder.

Kell Morris was hiking with his wife below a glacier outside the city of Anchorage when a rock slide sent him plunging into the creek. A 700lb (318kg) stone came to rest on top of his leg, pinning him in place.

His wife positioned his head out of the water and called for help from rescuers, giving them the exact coordinates of their location.

After a few days in hospital, he walked away nearly completely unscathed.

The accident occurred on Saturday near Godwin Glacier. Mr Morris says that the rock that pinned him in place landed in a “trough” of other rocks, protecting him from being crushed but preventing him from being able to move.

A rescue crew arrived by helicopter and had to use tools to lift the boulder.

They were also working against the clock: the glacier-fed creek was rising as the heat of the day caused ice and snow melt to occur more quickly.

“I thought, I’m not going to last long in this water,” Mr Morris recalled in an interview on Wednesday with the Anchorage Daily News.

“The water had gotten up to my chin,” Mr Morris said. “I was going in and out of consciousness. I’d been shivering, but I stopped shivering every once in a while.”

His wife Jo Roop, who works as a police officer for the city of Seward, made sure he was able to hold himself out of the water in a press up position so she could hike to find enough mobile phone service to call for help.

She still retained her sense of humour during the ordeal, he told Alaska Public Media (APM), recalling: “She graciously tells me, ‘don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.’”

Ms Roop was able to provide exact GPS coordinates for their location, according to rescue officials.

In a stroke of luck, a volunteer firefighter overheard the radio call for rescue while working for a sled dog tour company. He was able to divert a helicopter used for shuttling tourists to pick up rescuers and take them to the accident site.

But the helicopter was not able to land, due to the rough terrain.

“The patient was in a boulder field and the helicopter could only hover while firefighters had to jump from the helicopter to the ground as the helicopter could not land safely,” the Seward Fire Department said in a statement posted to Facebook.

Rescuers used inflatable airbags to lift the rock, and a National Guard helicopter brought Mr Morris to hospital where he was treated for hypothermia.

Now recovered, Mr Morris says he suffered little more than bruises, and is already back on his feet.

“I’m walking and, you know, if there was a band nearby, I’d go dancing tonight,” he told APM.

An Alaska man who was pinned facedown in an icy creek by a 700-pound boulder for three hours survived the ordeal with only minor injuries, thanks in part to his wife’s quick thinking and lots of luck.

Kell Morris’ wife held his head above water to prevent him from drowning while waiting for rescuers to arrive after Morris was pinned by the boulder, which crashed onto him during a hike near a remote glacier south of Anchorage.

His second stroke of luck came when a sled dog tourism company that operates on the glacier overheard the 911 dispatch and offered up its helicopter to ferry rescuers to the scene, which was inaccessible to all-terrain vehicles.

Once rescuers arrived, it took seven men and inflatable airbags to lift the boulder off as he drifted in and out of consciousness.

Morris, 61, said he realizes he is probably the luckiest man alive. “And luckier that I have such a great wife,” he said Thursday.

His wife, Jo Roop, is a retired Alaska State Trooper. They moved to Seward, about 120 miles south of Anchorage, from Idaho last fall when she took a job with the local police department.

On Saturday, they wanted to avoid the big crowds that converge on the Kenai Peninsula community during holidays and decided to hike near Godwin Glacier on an isolated and undeveloped trail behind a state prison, Seward Fire Chief Clinton Crites said.

Their trail was actually a rocky creek bed lined with large boulders deposited by the glacier.

Morris said he noticed dangerous boulders, some weighing up to 1,000 pounds, along the banks of the creek and avoided them the best he could, until he ran into an area he couldn’t pass.

“I was coming back and everything, the whole side slid out from under me,” he said.

He said things became a blur as he tumbled down the embankment about 20 feet, landing face down in the water.

Then he immediately felt the boulder hit his back in what Crites described as “basically an avalanche of boulders.”

The way Morris landed, there were rocks under him, in between his legs and around him that caught the weight of the boulder, preventing him from being crushed, Crites said. But the massive rock still had him pinned, and Morris felt intense pain in his left leg and waited for his femur to snap.

“When it first happened, I was doubtful that there was going to be a good outcome,” Morris said.

His wife tried to free him for about 30 minutes, putting rocks under the boulder and trying to roll it off him, before she left to find a cell signal.

Amazingly, she only had to walk about 300 yards to connect with 911 and relied on her law enforcement experience to send exact GPS coordinates to dispatch.

A volunteer at the neighboring Bear Creek Fire Department heard the call while working at the sled dog tourism operation and diverted the helicopter used to ferry tourists to the scene. Ultimately, firefighters who couldn’t navigate their all-terrain vehicles over the boulder field jumped out of the helicopter.

“The patient was in a boulder field and the helicopter could only hover while firefighters had to jump from the helicopter to the ground as the helicopter could not land safely,” the Seward Fire Department said in a statement posted to Facebook.

By this time, Morris was hypothermic from the cold water running off the glacier, Crites said, and his wife was holding his head out of the water.

“I think if we hadn’t had that private helicopter assist us, it would have taken us at least another 45 minutes to get to him, and I’m not sure he had that much time,” Crites said.

The Bear Creek Fire Department said it assisted the Seward Fire Department. “After dispatch one of our volunteers who was working with Seward Helicopter Tours contacted us and offered assistance by helicopter,” the Bear Creek Fire Department wrote on Facebook. “The pilot of the helicopter immediately jumped into action and helped haul gear and rescuers up to the patient aiding in quick response to the patient.”

The firefighters used two airbags normally reserved to extract people from wrecked vehicles to slightly lift the boulder.

“But then it just became an all-hands brute force of ‘one, two, three, push,’” Crites said. “And seven guys were able to lift it enough to pull the victim out.”

An Alaska National Guard helicopter lifted them out of the creek bed with a rescue basket.

Morris spent two nights at the local hospital for observation but walked away unscathed.

“I fully anticipated a body recovery, not him walking away without a scratch on him,” Crites said.

Morris, who is now reflecting on his ordeal at home, acknowledged it might have been a little wake-up call to stop doing things like this at his age.

“I was very lucky. God was looking out for me,” he said.

When he and his wife go hiking this weekend, they are going to stick to established trails.

“We’re going to stop the trailblazing,” he said.

“We are grateful we could support our first responders and help someone in need. So glad this story had a positive ending,” Seward Helicopter Tours wrote on Facebook.