The case of a Somali asylum seeker in Alaska who's been caught up in the Trump administration's immigration crackdown has provided a rare look at how immigration proceedings work in the state.
27-year-old Roble Ahmed Salad is one of about a half dozen people Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have detained in Alaska so far this year, according to reporting by the Anchorage Daily News.
Daily News reporter Michelle Theriault Boots says Salad's journey to Alaska began in 2022 when he crossed the U.S. border with Mexico.
Below is the transcript of an interview with Theriault Boots on Alaska News Nightly. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Theriault Boots: He went through the asylum proceedings process without an attorney and not having full English. He was denied for his asylum claim. But there was a problem: Because Mr. Salad is from Somalia, the government said, "We can't realistically deport him, because right now we don't have relations with Somalia, and we don't have assurance that if you deport someone to Somalia, you're not sending them back to a dysfunctional and dangerous place." So they said, "You're on something called supervised release, check in over a year from now."
Casey Grove: They just gave him, like, a court date?
MTB: Yeah, they gave him a court date. They said, "Show up in San Antonio, Texas on December 18, 2024." And so in the interim, Mr. Salad moved to Alaska. He found a job at an Anchorage assisted living facility. He found an apartment, he set up a life here, and he did, in fact, go fly to San Antonio, Texas to do that in-person check in with his immigration supervision.
Fast forward to, the Trump administration takes over, and there's a broad immigration crackdown that the president has made a lot of, and there have been no more than about half a dozen people picked up in Alaska since the beginning of the year. Mr. Salad, I believe, was the sixth person, and what his attorney argues is that because Mr. Salad is from Somalia, you can't deport him because he's also eligible for something called Temporary Protected Status. There's a list of countries where people are eligible for something called TPS, Temporary Protected Status, which basically means that they cannot be deported because their country is too dangerous or unstable for them to go back to. Somalia is on that list, though Trump has been pulling countries off that list quickly. Like Haiti was on that list, but it's not anymore.
So Mr. Salad, before he was arrested, he applied for this TPS, and that is the crux of the argument of why he cannot be deported, according to his attorneys, because if he's in the process for this TPS status, they can't kick him out of the country while that's pending. And just a few days ago, a judge agreed that he cannot be deported, because he has a potential Temporary Protected Status claim.
CG: Yeah, and it's this window into how ICE operates, and how it's operating right now, his case is. But like you said, he's one of half a dozen or so people, and this world is very opaque, right? I mean, trying to report on immigration and customs stuff. Tell me about that. How difficult was it to just even find out how many people and that sort of thing?
MTB: I mean, the way that I have kind of ever known anything that's going on with immigration enforcement in Alaska is by speaking with immigration attorneys here who are well versed in this system. It's unbelievably convoluted. It's wildly understaffed. People regularly wait years and years and years for their cases to be fully adjudicated. And yeah, none of it's really online, none of it's easy to look up. Once someone is detained in that system, it's really hard to find out physically where they are.
The reason that this caught my eye so much is that Mr. Salad's attorney filed the writ of habeas corpus in federal court, so that made it much more visible and transparent to me, because I could look at every single document, and I can keep abreast of every development that way. So that's another reason I kind of seized on this one case, because it's a rare look into a system that is truly hard to track.
CG: And those other folks that we know have been detained, do we know at this point if it's gone beyond that, or that's kind of a mystery because of what you just described?
MTB: I don't know for all of them. So there's a few things that could happen. Some people can get bonded out, and I do believe that has happened in a few of the cases, though I'm not precisely sure how many. Or people would be held at the
Anchorage jail through that deal that the state has with ICE and then transferred to Tacoma, Washington generally, which is the main detention center for kind of the Pacific Northwest region for immigration detention.
And from there, there are a number of paths, a number of hearings, that people would have to have before they would necessarily be deported. And that's kind of where you tend to lose the thread, is when people go into that big secondary place, they're out of Alaska, it becomes really hard to know what's become of them.
CG: You know, we're still just in the second month of the Trump presidency, the second Trump presidency, and people like this, like Mr. Salad, might seem like low-hanging fruit or something. Like they're on this list. It's easy for for ICE to, you know, find this guy that has been ordered deported, but it seems like there's probably more, more folks, more immigrants in Alaska than that, more than that half dozen. Are other people worried, or are the attorneys worried, that this is going to grow in scope?
MTB: I think there's a tremendous amount of fear and worry, and also misinformation, rumors, and I wish I could say with any certainty, "Oh, this is who ICE is targeting. This is how they're connected to their operations." I don't know that. I don't know that anyone knows that.
Nationally, the Trump administration has made a big point of saying that they are trying to deport, quote, "The worst first." People with really serious criminal records, violent charges against them. To my reporting so far in Alaska, I have not — and again, this is a small sample size of people. We're talking a half a dozen people — but that has not been the case in Alaska, where people have had serious or violent criminal charges that have been visible to me in the state system. So that's hard to say. I think that one thing to watch is that temporary protected status, people from certain groups that have that status right now, if that status is taken away, that may make people more vulnerable to deportation, and that seems to be changing. All of this seems to be changing almost minute by minute.
CG: Yeah. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Alaska isn't directly overseeing these operations or anything, but because this ended up in federal court, you know, the civil filing for Mr. Salad's attorney, they're sort of dealing with that. You reached out to them for a response, and what did they say?
MTB: They basically said, "The purpose of the U.S. Attorney's Office is to uphold federal law. And this is a matter of federal law."
