April 30, 2026 Seward Folly Commentary by Sheila Morrow

With Seward soon anticipating an even larger-than-usual influx of tourists and workers, this question hangs heavily on the minds of many local folks. Will the rush of summer workers include undocumented workers? Is there already a population of undocumented people among our friends and neighbors?

ICE has arrested at least 47 people in Alaska so far in 2026, according to the Department of Corrections. They have been held in local jails and transferred to a detention facility in Tacoma within a day or two.

Seeking answers to what Seward might experience and how we might legally respond led the Seward Rally Group for Democracy, in conjunction with the Seward Pride Alliance, to ask Alaska’s ACLU for help.

Cindy Woods, a senior immigration attorney, traveled to Seward on April 23 to address a gathering of over 25 concerned citizens. Cindy has practiced Immigration Law since 2018, working in Anchorage for the past 6 years. Before that, she worked in Texas, where she visited detainees in a big detention center daily.

Setting the stage, Cindy said the number of arrests in Alaska has greatly increased, 47 so far in 2026, compared to 56 in the first 10 months of 2025, while there are only a handful of ACLU immigration lawyers in the state. She has directly worked on building up the ACLU’s response to ICE activity in Alaska. To date, the arrests have been targeted and not based on random racial profiling, but change is constant.

Cindy detailed the legal rights of citizens and noncitizens and the actions we can take if we happen upon an ICE detention scene. This was not a call for policing of any kind, but about how to help a neighbor from the sideline, gathering information that will help in tracing them to the detention facility, connecting children to family, documenting, calling the ACLU, etc.

Alaskans are traveling folks. Hopefully, we will never need this information here, but perhaps somewhere. The ACLU offers frequent Zoom training, which is noted on their website.