ICE Is Transferring People in Its Custody Away From Family, Lawyers

A Coast Guard plane carrying several dozen people in immigration custody landed in Alaska in early June. 

Several of the men said that they didn’t have bathroom access on the plane — or even seats. They flew shackled in the cargo area of the plane. 

They’d been transferred from the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, to the Anchorage Correctional Complex, a facility run by the state Department of Corrections.

“From that moment on, I personally felt dehumanized,” said one man who kept a journal from the experience. 

Capital & Main is not identifying him or several other people in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement due to retaliation concerns.

“Being transferred is like the worst experience that anybody could go through.”

~ Luis Peralta, a detainee who has lived in the U.S. since childhood

 
Transfers of people in ICE custody between facilities are becoming more and more common under the Trump administration. According to an ICE Flight Monitor report from Human Rights First, transfer flights from January through August increased 43% compared with the same time period last year.

“These frequent transfers not only disorient individuals but also make it significantly harder for them to access legal counsel and maintain contact with family,” the report says. 

ICE and the Alaska Department of Corrections did not respond to requests for comment. GEO Group, the private prison company that runs the Tacoma facility, deferred to ICE.

Luis Peralta, who was transferred from Miami to Tacoma, told Capital & Main that officers did not allow him to bring his personal documents with him when they moved him. That meant that he didn’t have access to any phone numbers for family members — his mother’s had been written on a piece of paper in his belongings at the Miami facility.

That also meant he hadn’t been able to reach the attorney that his family found for him, he said. Peralta, who has been in the U.S. since he was a child and was arrested by ICE outside his home in Miami, said he hoped to fight to stay in the U.S. because he has several children here and provides for them.

“Hopefully we don’t get transferred again,” Peralta said. “Being transferred is like the worst experience that anybody could go through.”

He said that during the transfer, officials didn’t tell the group where the plane was headed until they had been flying for several hours. Each man received a piece of bread and cheese and a bottle of water as the only sustenance for the entire day, he said. 

Their wrists, ankles and waists were shackled together, he said. 

“If something malfunctions in the air, there’s nothing you can do about it,” he said. “It’s very, very, very scary.” 

“If I’m waiting to get deported, why would I go to Alaska?”

~ Detainee at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma

Another man transferred from Miami said that ICE transferred him after a judge approved his request for bond so that he could get out of custody.

“It was like a strategic move,” the man said. “I went to court. The judge approved me for a bond, and literally two days later I was here.”

He said a judge in Tacoma later denied him bond.

“I don’t see like it’s fair to us as human beings to just be shipping us around the country like this,” the man said. “I’m on the other side of the country away from my family. My family can’t come visit me.”

When guards informed men in one of the housing units at Northwest ICE Processing Center that they were being transferred to Alaska, some at first refused to go, according to accounts from several men in the unit. 

One man who was waiting to be deported said an ICE officer saw his name on the list and took it off, along with several others, so he stayed in Tacoma. He said other people who were sent to Alaska were also waiting for deportation.

“If I’m waiting to get deported, why would I go to Alaska?” he said. “It makes zero sense.”

After several of the men refused to leave the Tacoma facility, officials threatened them with federal criminal charges, according to multiple accounts. Then officials arrived in riot gear, according to the detainees. Some people used sheets to hold their doors closed, according to the detainees, while others watched, worried that they would be swept up in whatever violence might come, even though they weren’t participating.

“I felt frustrated. I felt powerless”

~ José Alvarez, a detainee transferred to Alaska

Before the officials in riot gear entered the unit, those on the list negotiated with ICE, according to the detainees. 

“They’d rather go rather than be hurt and then go,” one man recalled other detainees saying. 

The men sent to Alaska said their transfer there meant they spent several weeks in conditions even worse than those they had previously complained about at the Tacoma facility run by GEO Group — conditions that contradict ICE’s own policies and standards.

“I felt frustrated,” José Alvarez recalled in Spanish of his transfer to Alaska. “I felt powerless.”

Several of the men told Capital & Main that they were not allowed to make phone calls for days, so they were unable to inform their families or their attorneys what had happened to them or where they were. Under the ICE detention standards, facilities are required to provide phone access to detainees during waking hours.

When, after several days, one man asked for access to his belongings so he could get a phone number to make a call, a guard at the facility left and returned with other guards who launched pepper spray, according to several of the men.

“You are completely unable to breathe for two days, and you’re coughing every 10 seconds because all the residue is stuck to the walls and the floor,” one man recalled.

The men were held in overcrowded cells, with one sleeping on a mattress on the floor, they said. In another violation of ICE detention standards, they weren’t given daily access to the yard, they said. 

The American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska wrote a letter to the Alaska Department of Corrections and ICE about the conditions that the men were held in, including the incident involving pepper spray, which the letter calls a “particularly egregious and excessive use of force.”

The letter says that the facility staff did not follow ICE guidance which would require a consultation with medical staff prior to using pepper spray.

“If they had, they would have been made aware that one of the individuals whom they pepper sprayed was diagnosed with borderline chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and that exposure to such an irritant could be deadly,” the ACLU of Alaska wrote in the letter.

In the letter, the ACLU noted that it had already sued over conditions in the facility in the state criminal system before ICE moved people in its custody there, and it said that multiple people have died in the facility this year.

“In other words, ACC currently does not safely house those charged with or convicted of crimes,” the ACLU wrote in the letter (emphasis in original). “And immigrant detainees are entitled to even greater protections.”

That’s because people in ICE custody are in civil detention rather than criminal custody, meaning that they cannot be held as punishment and the standards for what custody looks like for them are supposed to be different. 

“On June 4, 2025, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) agent asked how many immigrant detainees the Anchorage Correctional Complex (“ACC”) could safely house for longer than 72 hours,” the letter says. “Given the inability of ACC to meet federal standards of care, the answer should have been zero.”

A few of the men were deported while in Alaska. The rest returned to Northwest ICE Processing Center after a few weeks at the Alaska facility.

But as ICE transfers continue to increase, the detainees do not know how long they might remain there.

“We’re not animals,” Peralta said. “Animals are treated better than the way we are being treated in here.”

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