Immigration officials detained an Anchorage man originally from Peru on Friday, according to his wife, who says she’s been left in the dark about what will happen to him next.
Cristian Ibanez Velasquez, 32, had dropped his wife at work Friday morning and returned home when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers approached him in the couple’s driveway.
He’s been in jail ever since, said his wife, Paola Jimenez, in an interview Thursday, nearly a week later. Jimenez said she just wants to know if he’s safe.
“I just want to know when my husband's gonna get out, when he's gonna be safe and sound at home, because I don't know how it is inside,” she said. “I don't know if he's safe in there.”
As ICE was detaining him, Ibanez Velasquez called Jimenez. He only speaks Spanish, she said, and the officers detaining him didn’t have an interpreter.
The officers told Jimenez that her husband had been marked for deportation, she said. They said they were taking him to the Anchorage Correctional Complex and that he would eventually be sent an immigration facility in Tacoma, Washington.
Ibanez Velasquez entered the United States illegally in 2022, the couple married in Alaska in 2024, and while they had intended to pursue citizenship for him, they never did, Jimenez said.
While in jail, Ibanez Velasquez has been able to make sporadic phone calls and Jimenez has been able to visit him, but visitation was canceled at least once. And her husband said he was not getting a medication he’s supposed to take for heartburn, which Jimenez attributed to a language barrier.
“He said that the nurse told him that he needs to ask that in writing and give it to the guard,” Jimenez said. “But my husband doesn't know how to read, how to say or do anything in English.”
Jimenez is adamant that her husband has no criminal record and, though he was caught entering the United States illegally in 2022, had been in regular contact with ICE about his whereabouts and immigration case. That involved using an app on his phone to snap photos of himself every Sunday and occasional in-person check-ins, she said.
“The same officer that was doing his check-ins for him was the same officer that detained him that day,” Jimenez said. “Nobody told him there was something else going wrong.”
Ibanez Velasquez was a mechanic in Peru and had been following a dream, along with his cousin, to come to the U.S., first to Chicago, Jimenez said. When that didn’t work out, he came to Alaska in 2023, when the couple met, and they married in October of 2024, Jimenez said.
They got two cats together – Cosmo and Tac – and after the wedding had planned to apply to get citizenship for Ibanez Valasquez, she said.
“The whole process is expensive to start. A, B and C, there was always something in the middle,” Jimenez said. “It was hard to be able to pay for everything for us, and then start the process. So we just never got around to it, unfortunately. And then this happened, and it just changed everything completely.”
As immigration enforcement ramped up under President Donald Trump’s administration, the couple saw news stories about ICE rounding up immigrants for deportation, Jimenez said.
“But that was more in the Lower 48,” she said. “Obviously, it was in the back of our heads, you know, like, ‘We still got to be careful.’ But then I think it was probably a month before this happened to my husband, that three are also picked up here, I believe. Well, then it happened to him.”
A Seattle-based spokesperson for ICE sent a general written statement in response to a request for comment on Ibanez Velasquez’s case.
"U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not indiscriminately conduct enforcement actions on random people," ICE public affairs officer David Yost wrote. "All aliens in violation of U.S. immigration law may be subject to arrest, detention and if found removable by final order, removal from the United States, regardless of nationality."
Activists plan to protest Ibanez Velasquez’s detention in a rally set for 5:30 p.m. Thursday in front of the Department of Homeland Security offices in downtown Anchorage.
