Officers wearing U.S. Border Patrol uniforms were the first to arrive at two vehicle accidents on Egan Drive last week, to the surprise of people involved in the collisions who were among the first to meet the recently established deployment. But a supervisor says the officers — at the scene and in Juneau as a new permanent unit — are here for purposes other than the mass immigrant roundups Donald Trump is promising as he returns to the White House.
The two Border Patrol officers stationed in Juneau will work with police and other entities throughout Southeast Alaska on high-priority illegal activities — largely involving drugs — rather than conducting raids involving restaurant kitchen staff and setting up deportation camps, said Ross Wilkin, patrol agent in charge of the Border Patrol’s Blaine Sector office, which is responsible for operations in Washington, Oregon and Alaska.
“We don’t want people to be concerned that there’s a restaurant that’s going to get raided or something like that,” he said. “This is not the goal of this effort.”
The timing of the local deployment also isn’t related to Trump’s ramped-up crackdown on immigration, since it comes after a trial period last spring as part of an effort to expand Alaska operations that officially began in 2022.
“The question of individuals being ‘illegal’ in our community hasn’t even come up in our conversations,” Juneau Police Chief Derek Bos said Saturday. “Our conversations have been focused almost exclusively on illegal narcotics distribution.”
Concerns have been expressed in recent months by refugees from countries such as Ukraine and Haiti now living in Juneau, due to the Biden administration announcing last fall it wasn’t extending temporary legal status to hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving since 2022, along with Trump’s pledged crackdown. There are now more than 30 living in Juneau, but Joyanne Bloom, a local sponsor for refugees who helped start the Juneau Refugee Relief Fund, said in theory they shouldn’t have to worry about being targeted.
“All of our refugees that we have supported are here legally and so we expect that they will be treated accordingly,” she said.
Wilkin, in Juneau to supervise the launch of the Juneau operation, said surprised residents are responding with questions to be expected when Border Patrol officials wearing their uniforms show up, as happened with the traffic collisions during icy conditions last Thursday.
“We were out yesterday driving just from the office down to town and there were two vehicle accidents with no police,” he said. “So we pulled over. We were in uniform because we were going to meetings. And everybody was like ‘What are you guys doing here?’ They haven’t seen us before that. They have questions about that.”
Both of the officers assigned to Juneau have worked for the Border Patrol for many years and were selected for having area-appropriate skills such as vessel commander certification since “obviously we’re going to be doing a lot of maritime work,” Wilkins said.
Regional drug enforcement already exists through Southeast Alaska Cities Against Drugs (SEACAD), a task force of 15 municipal, state and federal law enforcement agencies. Bos said the primary benefit of adding the Border Patrol to that effort is the agency’s broader scope of intelligence about drug trafficking.
“We look at this as a great partnership with the Border Patrol to try to help identify how are narcotics coming into not just Juneau, but Southeast Alaska. It’ll give us better intelligence, better ability to identify methods that they’re coming in. Obviously all of Southeast Alaska shares a border with Canada. There’s a lot of questions of how are drugs coming across the border from Canada into our communities here and how can we disrupt that.”
The focus of the Border Patrol agents in Southeast Alaska will be what the agency calls transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), and “our goal here is to degrade and limit the mobility of the TCOs who operate in the region,” Wilkin said.
“We have a couple of specific areas that we’ve identified as greater risk, because all of our approach is risk-based,” he said.
One of those areas is the Taku River, which along with other navigable waterways that cross into Alaska from Canada are potential concerns, Wilkin said.
“It is one of the identified areas of risk, if you will, because of the ease of mobility,” he said. “There is no port of entry. There are people crossing the border on a regular basis without checking in, without being inspected. A lot of these people are legitimate travelers who are bringing fish to Juneau or whatever. They’re not engaged in criminal activity. But we have, I’ll say, reporting and technology because that’s part of our laydown — with two agents they can’t cover this vast and challenging environment, so we have to use technology to to make those assessments and cue the agents so they’re not looking for a needle in a haystack, if you will.”
Bos said that many current drug busts are occurring via mail and people detained at the airport, and “when we start putting pressure on that our the criminal enterprises find other ways to bring the narcotics in.”
“We don’t know if narcotics are coming up and down the Taku River,” he said when asked if JPD is aware of any such trafficking. “So that’s definitely something that we want to explore.”
In addition to law enforcement agencies, the Border Patrol is also working on partnership agreements with tribal organizations, including the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. Wilkin said.
“In this huge region there’s no way that these two Border Patrol agents can accomplish this without participation and collaboration from the partners,” he said. “So Tlingit and Haida, being a large community obviously, is deeply concerned about cross-border activity. They’re right on the border, they observe this activity and they also have expressed their concerns to us about this.”
Tlingit and Haida, in a written statement Monday responding to questions about their expectations for working with the Border Patrol in the region, commended “the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for bringing Tribal voices forward under the Tribal Homeland Security Advisory Council.” The tribe also stated it “supports efforts to prevent drugs like fentanyl crossing (the) border and impacting communities and Tribal citizen families.”
The Border Patrol is a component of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which has long had a presence in Juneau since the city is considered a port of entry, Wilkin said. Temporary Border Patrol postings began in Alaska in 2019 and the first two permanent officers were assigned to Anchorage in 2022 as part of an Arctic strategic plan developed by the White House.
While the new officers will be noticeable while performing their duties in uniform around Southeast, they won’t have a proper office or local phone number in Juneau for the public to contact Wilkin said. He said they will when needed use office space in the building occupied by the Alaska State Troopers in Juneau, as well as working with other agencies such as the U.S. Coast Guard in the field.
“We call them resident agents so we don’t have an official station — like as designated by Congress — where we have our sign out front and our flag out front,” he said. “Resident agents operate out of their homes. That’s their official duty station. We have them all across the northern border. They’re typically in austere locations where there isn’t a lot of infrastructure.”
Wilkin, who’s worked for the Border Patrol for 23 years, said “I’ve been around a long time and priorities change with administrations.” He said he won’t speculate how Trump’s return to office might affect what priorities are set for the Border Patrol officers in Alaska.
“Every new leader has their own priorities,” he said. “And as we go through those leaders then we implement those priorities. So what might be a priority for one president or commissioner or secretary might not be for another.”
Trump on Monday was expected to sign 10 executive orders related to immigrants, some of which are certain to result in legal challenges, according to The New York Times. Among those are involving the U.S. military in border security — since federal law limits how the armed forces can be deployed inside the country — and declaring an end to birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
Trump also reversed several immigration orders from Biden’s presidency, including one that narrowed deportation priorities to people who commit serious crimes, are deemed national security threats, or were stopped at the border, according to the Associated Press. It revives Trump’s first-term policy that everyone in the country illegally is a priority for deportation.
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.