The two U.S. Border Patrol officers newly stationed in Juneau will work with law enforcement throughout Southeast on high-priority illegal activities — largely involving drugs — not conducting workplace raids and setting up deportation camps, said Ross Wilkin, patrol agent in charge of the Border Patrol’s 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 sector office is based in Blaine, Washington.
The timing of the Juneau deployment isn’t related to Trump’s ramped-up crackdown on immigration. The new staffing comes after a trial period last spring as part of an effort to expand Alaska operations.
“The question of individuals being ‘illegal’ in our community hasn’t even come up in our conversations,” Juneau Police Chief Derek Bos said. “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 refugees living in Juneau.
Wilkin was in Juneau to supervise the launch of the operation.
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. Juneau’s police chief 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.”
Bos said many drug busts are occurring via the mail and people detained at the airport, and “when we start putting pressure on that, the criminal enterprises find other ways to bring the narcotics in.”
The Border Patrol is a component of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
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