Like many Alaskans, legislators this week are trying to get answers on ICE’s shocking arrest and deportation of a 5-year-old kindergartener, his mother and two siblings.
Was due process fully provided to the Arriaga family? Was the legal precedent followed to ensure they minimized trauma to children? Did they have adequate legal counsel and care?
And most chillingly, as Anchorage Democratic Rep. Andrew Gray stated at Monday’s House Judiciary Committee meeting, “Is Alaska about to see more children detained?”
Lawmakers got no official answers from the feds, who didn’t participate, but the hearing underscored the alarm over what was seen as a harsh escalation of ICE’s tactics in Alaska. It included testimony from an attorney who represents young children in federal immigration custody, several local faith leaders, some state officials and the mother of a kindergartener who shared a classroom with Matias Arriaga.
“He was working so hard. He was following my instructions and sounding out his words. I could tell how proud he felt,” Allison Flack said about her last interaction with the kindergartener while volunteering in her daughter’s classroom and the ensuing shock that they felt when they saw Sonia Arriaga and her family had been detained early last week. “I knew that they had our boy. Not only was I surprised to see ICE activity in my state, but that they would involve children, and that action was truly shocking to me.”
Testimony from others in the community was similarly sympathetic to the Arriaga’s family situation. Several faith leaders said the detention of children in Alaska was a deeply troubling moral failure for the country. They detailed the fight to protect the family or even understand where they were in the legal process.
Rev. Michael Burke, who is among a multi-faith coalition speaking out against the detention of the family, said that he’s deeply concerned that the efforts are targeting children, warning that Alaska has laws against exposing children to traumatic or violent events. He also said the Arriaga family had no criminal history, and the lone violation seems to be a missed status hearing earlier this year.
“We have no previous knowledge of any detention of minor children in the state of Alaska by ICE or associated federal agencies. Recognizing that the state has, to our knowledge, no facilities for the adequate care of minor children, we had immediate concerns for their safety and well-being in the wake of potentially traumatic environmental events such as this,” he said. “Reviewing the actions of the ICE agents as a whole raised some grave moral concerns for us as clergy leaders and members of the community, because the entire operation seemed to be indicative of a lack of training or a lack of due care, especially given that it was known prior that children — minor children — would be involved.”
For the state’s part, the Alaska State Troopers played no role in the detentions, Deputy Commissioner Leon Morgan told the committee. He said that because immigration issues are civil, not criminal, the troopers have a longstanding policy of not getting involved.
“We don’t coordinate with ICE for immigration enforcement,” he said. “We don’t do Title 8 enforcement.”
The Alaska Department of Corrections, however, does coordinate with ICE to hold detainees in the Alaska prison system, usually for about 72 hours before they’re moved to other immigration facilities. Officials said detainees are treated largely like other prisoners, though they are kept separate.
Last year, the state came under fire for agreeing to house 35 federal detainees at the Anchorage jail for longer than 72 hours. During that visit, they were reportedly exposed to tuberculosis — a severe respiratory infection — and one person was hospitalized.
Matias Arriaga, his mother and 16-year-old brother were held in detention at a hotel before they were quickly deported to Mexico. His 18-year-old brother was held in the Anchorage Jail before he was moved to an ICE detention site in Tacoma, Wash.
The whirlwind detention and removal of the Arriaga family shocked even Lora Mukherjee, the director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, who has represented dozens of young children in immigration detention. She also said there are concerns about whether ICE is complying with the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement that guides the federal government’s treatment of minors, noting many stories of child detentions that seem designed to victimize children.
“I was shocked to read about this family’s experiences and how quickly they were removed from the United States. This absolutely should not be the norm,” she said, comparing the case to the headline-making treatment of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who was detained by ICE while he was walking home from school. “This violates multiple provisions of the US Constitution and federal law.”
She said she was concerned that their treatment violated the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantees of due process, which should have allowed them to file an appeal of the removal order.
“This family didn’t have an opportunity to contest the removal order … because they were so swiftly and abruptly deported from the United States,” she said. “This is not what due process requires. This is not what the Constitution allows. This family should have had an opportunity to be heard on whatever claim the US government, the executive branch, is making against them.”
Precisely what, if anything, legislators can do about the case, or future cases, wasn’t immediately clear on Monday, but Mukherjee said they can, for example, pass resolutions voicing the state’s opposition to what’s happening. She also noted that several other states and local governments have worked to limit involvement with ICE or worked to block plans for ICE to build new detention facilities.
Rep. Gray said the committee will be working on a resolution, noting that much of the current situation stems from the immigration system and that broad immigration reforms are essential to reining in ICE.
“We do need federal reform, and that may be the most that this committee can do. Call on our federal delegation to pursue urgent, meaningful immigration reform,” he said, noting that some people have questioned why the Legislature is involved in the first place. “I can’t look away, and I know that most Alaskans cannot look away either. When children are detained in our communities, when families are taken from their homes, when questions of due process and constitutional protections arise, that is our lane, because it is happening here in Alaska.”
For Flack, the mother of the student who shared a classroom with Matias Arriaga, she said the whole incident has shaken her faith in the system. Matias wasn’t some violent criminal, but simply a young boy trying his best to learn to read.
“I used to feel like we knew how to keep our children and our community members safe,” she said. “We knew the laws. We could trust that our leadership would follow those laws. We were told that only the worst of the worst were going to be deported. That was clearly a lie.”