Her husband is getting deported. She plans to leave Anchorage to meet him in Peru

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.

[Ukrainian refugees begin planning departures from Alaska ahead of expiring statuses]

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.

[Amid immigration crackdown, Anchorage leaders push back at city’s inclusion on federal list of ‘sanctuary jurisdictions’]

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.”