OPINION: ICE in Alaska

Published 5:30 am Thursday, March 19, 2026

On Feb. 17, a Soldotna family was torn apart when federal ICE agents took a mother and her three children from their home. Sonia Espinoza Arriaga and her 16- and 5-year-old children were deported to Tijuana, Mexico. Her 18-year-old son, Alexis Arriaga, was separated from the family and is currently being detained at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington. Mrs. Arriaga’s husband, an Alaskan and American citizen, witnessed the aggressive arrest. Mrs. Arriaga has been in the United States since 2023. She has no criminal record and was legally seeking asylum.

Kenai River Quakers seek a U.S. immigration system that respects and honors the rights, safety and dignity of every person. Our faith is rooted in the belief that all people have inherent worth and dignity. Our actions are grounded by the knowledge that God is present in all people, including migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants.

We draw on the Quaker values of justice,simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality and stewardship to make the following statements:

We support the Arriaga family and want them returned to Soldotna. Alaskans were told that immigration enforcement would target “criminals and rapists” and “the worst of the worst.” The Trump administration betrays our Quaker value of integrity when it targets innocent and law-abiding community members with violent enforcement actions, such as family separation.

We support other families in Alaska who are threatened by an unjust immigration system. We value peace and community, which cannot exist unless people feel safe, protected and able to participate in community life. Our Soldotna faith community is aware of people, including American citizens, who are terrified that they will be targeted and disappeared by the federal government. We believe the current immigration system is designed to terrorize communities.

White House border czar Tom Homan uses language historically associated with overseas war to describe ICE activities. Violent language and actions traumatize our communities. A Soldotna mother has already testified in an Alaska House Judiciary Committee hearing about the pain and trauma of explaining the disappearance of her child’s friend from kindergarten.

We request that Alaskan resources be used to support immigrants and pathways to citizenship. Immigrants continue to contribute to our communities and Alaskan workforce. Our Quaker value of simplicity includes careful spending of tax dollars. Congress gave ICE $85 billion in the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act while defunding health care and other programs for American communities. Meanwhile, Congress has not acted to fix our broken immigration system. The surge in ICE funding has not made communities safer. Instead our economy suffers as ICE quota incentivizes our tax dollars being used to punish people like the Arraiga family, who are not criminals.

We support the civil liberties of all people in the United States of America. We do not support ICE tactics that erode our American civil liberties, such as unlawfully entering people’s homes without a judicial warrant, arresting people without due cause, allowing agents to be masked, using unnecessary force and not complying with court orders. Federal enforcement agencies are given the grave responsibility of wielding state sanctioned violence.

We do not consent to these agencies avoiding policies and training designed to make their actions transparent and accountable to the American people.

We request that the privatized immigration detention system be defunded and dismantled.

We do not support the Department of Homeland Security and ICE using billions of our tax dollars to create a private detention system.

Congressional oversight of these facilities has not been allowed. Whistle blowers report inhumane conditions such as overcrowding, lack of food, lack of water, lack of medical care and unsanitary conditions in detention centers. Amnesty International has documented human rights violations that are akin to torture in Florida detention camps.

The system appears to be designed to avoid transparency and accountability by moving detainees to avoid court oversight.

Detainees have been lost or disappeared after entering the system. A privatized detention system is also ripe for corruption and self-dealing. For example, detention facilities have been bought at over market value creating huge windfalls for investors who have owned the property for short periods of time before selling to ICE.

We ask that politicians and other leaders treat immigrants with dignity and respect. We do not support the Trump administration’s dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrant families in our communities. President Trump has repeatedly and consistently attacked immigrants with dehumanizing language. Other than Alaska Natives and other Indigenous people who have lived here since time immemorial, we are a nation of immigrants. To be American is a commitment to the Constitution and rule of law. We condemn white nationalist talking points that scapegoat and fearmonger about immigration, such as the false narrative that immigrants replace real Americans.

Dawn Magness, Daniel Shackleton Funk lll, John Kasukonis, Ouida Parker and Kim Keck are members of the Kenai River Friends Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).