How Did an Alaska Native Corporation Become an ICE Detention Giant?

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1:02Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Kotzebue is a community of about 3 ,000 people in northwest Alaska. It sits roughly 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle. It's pretty remote. There's no roads that connect to the community or any of the communities in the region. We primarily travel by plane, boat, or in the wintertime we use snowmobiles to kind of travel along the ice. Desiree Hagan lives there. She's the news director of the local public radio station, KOTZ. In Kotzebue, I'm the only news person. I'm the only reporter. And it's a region the size of Indiana. Most of Kotzebue's residents are Inupiaq, a group indigenous to northwestern Alaska.

1:56Their families have been there for generations. It's a community big on nature. We have a major dog race. It's like the last dog race of the season, dog machine race. It's in April. I've always wanted to do it. I've always thought, like, maybe one day I could do this race. Many residents are also shareholders or employees of Nana. It's a for-profit corporation established by Congress in the 1970s as a settlement over land claims by indigenous tribes and to prop up Alaska's native economies. Twice a year, Nana shareholders get a dividend payout of the company's profits. Everybody looks forward to Nana dividends, to dividend time.

2:39In 2025, the average payout for the year per shareholder will be about$3 ,300. They'll hold off doing things until they get their dividend. Like, once I get my dividend, I'm going to get a new four-wheeler. Or, you know, hey, can I borrow some money? I'll pay you back when dividends get here. Historically, that money came from Nana's work in local industries, like oil and mining. In fact, Nana leases the mining rights to one of the largest lead and zinc mines in the world. But in recent years, the overwhelming majority of Nana's revenue, the money that's fueling those dividend payments, it's come from a subsidiary of the company.

3:16And a chunk of that money comes from a corner of Nana's business that some shareholders say they weren't aware of, ICE detention facilities. There were folks who were surprised to learn that the company was involved in this work. Potley Mossens is an investigative reporter at Bloomberg. She visited Kotzebue to report with Desiree on Nana's growing relationship with ICE. And Potley says that as news of those government contracts has come to light, it's caused deep concern among some in the community. The shareholders who I spoke with, they all sort of had the same refrain, that they were, you know, they totally understood that these might be profitable contracts, but they were concerned that however profitable they might be, that they did not uphold the values of their community and that they were concerned about human rights conditions and how people might be treated in these facilities.

4:09I'm David Gurra, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, a collaboration between Bloomberg News, KOTZ, and Alaska Public Media. How an Alaska Native corporation became an ICE detention giant. And why some of its shareholders are now speaking out.

4:31Alaska Native corporations were established through the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971. In exchange for dropping their claims to vast areas of the state, Alaska Natives received roughly 45 million acres of land and nearly$1 billion in a settlement payment. The act helped clear the way for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System and came after a push from Alaska Native leaders to create an alternative to the reservation system of the lower 48 states. It also divided Alaska into 12 regions and established a private for-profit regional corporation for each of them. NANA is one of those corporations.

5:09The regional corporations got mineral and oil rights for those lands. And NANA's over 15 ,000 shareholders are eligible for a cut of those profits. Here's KOTZ's Desiree Hagan. One of the reasons that this was created was some of the people that were sort of the architects of the system, they wanted people to be independent so that they could do activities like subsistence hunting and fishing and would have a sort of passive income. Desiree and Bloomberg's Polly Mossons have been reporting on NANA, the Alaska native corporation that got spun up in Kotzebue and its surrounding area, after President Nixon signed that legislation into law.

5:52Polly says at first, NANA invested in industries that were close to home. In their business, sort of in the 70s and early 80s, a lot of what they're focused on is natural resources. They're focused on oil, on mining, on supporting the trans-Alaska pipeline system. and they start to struggle a little bit. They're having a little bit of trouble and Congress sees a way out. They see a solution and they decide to extend what's called the 8A program. The 8A program is essentially a carve-out. It's meant to help socially and economically disadvantaged groups compete for government contracts and it requires the federal government to reserve a certain percentage of contracts to bidders from those backgrounds.

6:35That basically means that instead of competing in this huge, wide world of government contracting, you're competing in a different program that's a little bit smaller and geared towards these smaller, perhaps disadvantaged groups. Nana has been doing work for the federal government as far back as 1995, when it got a contract to provide services to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. They're doing variety of work in all corners of the federal government. There's technical work, There's tech support. There's DOD contracting. You know, it's not like they are just in one teeny tiny sliver of the federal government.

7:12There is no shortage of contracts that they are going to take on. And in 2012, Nana organized all of its federal contracting under one subsidiary called ACMA. The next year, ACMA hired a former assistant ICE field office director. His LinkedIn page lists his role at the company that year as director of operations. By 2014, Acoma won its first contract to run an ICE detention facility, the Chrome North Service Processing Center in Miami. You might have heard of Chrome more recently this year because it was one of the centers that was over capacity in the early Trump administration earlier this year.

7:48That is their first foray into ICE work. From there, they take on the Batavia Detention Center, which is in New York State. And now they've got about a half dozen places that they're operating. Among those half dozen other places is Guantanamo Bay. Through its subsidiary, Nana runs the Trump administration's migrant detention facility there. That's a really big one. I think that that is a facility that has not actually held a ton of people, but gotten a lot of attention because of its location. What do we know, broadly speaking, about the conditions inside these ICE facilities that are run by Acoma?

8:20So I'll start off by speaking about Chrome. Chrome, during the second Trump administration in its early days, you know, it was being cited for just overflow issues. And, you know, the other thing that we start hearing about Chrome is that people feel unsafe there. They feel overcrowded. Since the start of the year, four men in ICE custody have died after being detained at Chrome. At another Ockama-managed detention center near Buffalo, New York, government inspectors repeatedly found that guards used inappropriate force. In a lawsuit, those detained there have alleged they were subject to forced labor.

8:56Ackma has denied the forced labor allegations, and the case hasn't yet gone to trial. ICE did not respond to requests for comment, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security have not responded to claims by detained immigrants Bloomberg spoke with. Nana also did not reply to a detailed list of questions from Bloomberg. However, in April, after a Facebook poll was conducted by some shareholders who were concerned about this line of work, the company did note that they felt like this work did uphold their values of their community. And the company noted that they were not able to disclose some of the nature of the contract and speak publicly extensively at the time.

9:35But through the years, Nana's contract work through Acoma and the 8A program has only grown. Polly says it's a noteworthy example of a diversity and inclusion initiative that survived under an administration trying to get rid of them. NANA subsidiaries have secured contracts worth nearly$1.2 billion to work with ICE over the past decade. That's according to government contracting data compiled by Bloomberg government. So what does all this mean for NANA shareholders? In Kotzebue, Polly spoke with Roswell Schaefer Sr., a man who's had many lives in the city. Growing up, everybody had to help in the household to survive.

10:14So we picked berries, we picked greens, we hunt constantly. I picked salmon berries yesterday. Oh, you did, huh? I got a half gallon. Hey, cool. He's been a commercial fisherman, a subsistence hunter, and an artist. He's been a mayor, a councilman, and a judge. And from 1990 to 1992, he was also the president and chief executive officer of NANA. He told Polly the Nana of today is a far cry from the corporation he oversaw. So what kind of business was Nana doing at the time that you were president? Well, they had a construction company. We had a fishing business. Oil. Oil services. Electrical services up on the North Slope.

11:00We had all kinds of jobs like that. Now, with the ICE contracts, Schaefer says the corporation has lost its way. That type of contract really goes contrary to our values. Absolutely. Detention facilities like that are against our principles. A lot of Nana's ice business is run thousands of miles away from Kotzebue. So who's in charge, and how are shareholders making their concerns known? That's after the break.

11:45Over the last decade, NANA, the Alaska Native corporation based in the city of Kotzebue, has won contracts worth more than$1 billion to run and support ICE detention facilities. And residents of the community, who get a dividend of the corporation's profits, are starting to raise concerns that this business doesn't align with the community's values. But Bloomberg's Polly Massen says that a lot of that business happens far away. Cotsview doesn't have ICE detention facilities in town. And the subsidiary that handles Nana's federal contracting, Acoma, is headquartered thousands of miles away from the Arctic Circle.

12:19So they are run really kind of like a traditional, classic government contractor. It's exactly where you expect them to be, an office park in Virginia. You know, the folks who are running it have a lot of career experience in the federal government. and some folks who they're hiring, that's really what they've always done. Just in this case, they're doing it for an Alaska Native corporation. Crucial to all that business is ACMA's CEO and president, Bill Monet. He's a Virginia executive who's worked in government contracting for decades. Monet is certainly well compensated. If we look at his compensation over the last six years, it's almost$40 million.

12:57In 2024, Monet received$7.9 million, according to a proxy statement filed by the company. That's roughly$2 million more than the total compensation that year of the former CEO of GeoGroup, the biggest private prison operator in the country. I do think that that is notable. You know, that's certainly not all of Bill Monet's job. They do a whole lot of other contracting. DOD work is a huge part of their business, like it is with most federal contracting. But I do think it's important to know what his compensation looks like over that time. You mentioned that word began to spread about these ICE contracts that Nana had.

13:32How would you describe that reaction among people in the community as they learned about that, the reaction among shareholders to that news? I think a lot of people were shocked. They had not heard of it. KOTZ's Desiree Hagan says that as news of Nana's ICE contracts traveled through the community, some shareholders found it troubling. One thing that comes up a lot is that it goes against their value system. So there are different values. It's Inupak Ilucusate, which is like, actually I have them right here, a list. I think it's about, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.

14:13I think it's about 17 is what I'm counting. You know, and they're like, respect for elders, respect for tribe, respect for nature, you know, cooperation, hard work, humility, humor. You know, they go on. But one of the things that I heard a few people say is like, why are we doing this to other brown people? You know, why are we, as Inupiaq people, doing this to another marginalized group? Polly says some shareholders are starting to speak out. There was that Facebook poll in March. It drew responses from 100 shareholders, and a majority of respondents said they disapproved of the work. A Nana shareholder emailed the corporation's board expressing her disapproval of Nana's contracts with ICE.

14:57A few months after she sent that letter, the shareholder received a response from the board chair. And the board chair, in a one-page letter, basically said, we are comfortable with these contracts, the board has conducted site visits, and that's that. And in late July, the issue resurfaced at a community meeting for Nana shareholders in the village of Deering. My English name is Rue Ramos. I'm calling from the lower 48, but I care deeply about what happens to our community, to our people, and how Nana leads. The meeting was intended to cover general business matters, but several shareholders pressed Nana's board on why Aqaba continues to work with ICE.

15:40So I'm asking and hoping for leadership from NANA to really assess whether those relationships are worth the financial windfall that's clearly coming our way. So I really encourage us all to really think about being displaced from our lands as a lower 48 Inuit. I feel really strongly that being displaced is the place in which our hearts and our spirits go to die. So I really hope that you all see the pain that what I'm doing to people are causing problems. So I am asking. I'm just hearing you all the numbers. We have real poor connections. Nana's president said he thought their comments were heartfelt, but noted that connectivity issues made it difficult for some people on the call to hear them.

16:31Meanwhile, Akama's business with ICE is continuing to grow. The value of Nana's ICE contracts this year is approaching$300 million, a figure that Polly says is rising sharply. That is an increase of$100 million since last year. And while those are both plenty large numbers, we also need to be looking ahead at the$45 billion with a B dollars that are going to be dedicated to this line of work in the future. Now, I do think that as more people find out, perhaps that those careers are going to be more frequent. Perhaps there'll be more shareholders asking these questions. But among the shareholders who have posed the question so far, they have not found a super robust plan from the board being presented.

17:15They haven't released any information about moving away from these contracts or anything like that. Just that their impressions thus far is that they will be continuing with this line of work and they do believe that their values are being upheld in how they handle this line of work.

17:35This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. If you like this episode, make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.