Roswell Schaeffer Sr. has had many lives in Kotzebue, Alaska, a coastal town of about 3,000 just north of the Arctic Circle. He’s been a commercial fisherman, a subsistence hunter and holder of just about every local political position—mayor, councilman, judge. Eventually, he got the biggest gig in town: He took over as president and chief executive officer of NANA Regional Corp., an Alaska Native company of which he’s one of more than 15,000 Iñupiaq shareholders. From 1990 to 1992, he ran one of the largest companies based in a vast 38,000-square-mile region of the remote Arctic, one with outsize cultural, historic and economic importance to the Iñupiat people.
NANA’s stated mission is “to improve the quality of life for our people by maximizing economic growth” while honoring core Iñupiat principles, which include treating people with “dignity and respect.” When Schaeffer was president, NANA did that mostly by investing in Alaskan mining and hospitality businesses that hired shareholders. He says he took pride in the work.
That was a very different NANA. Through several presidential administrations, the company has turned itself into a large government contractor, with its biggest revenue generator run out of an office park in a suburb of Washington, DC. NANA's largest contracts, worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, are with the Department of Defense. But over the past decade, one of its fastest-growing lines of government business is with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Schaeffer now says NANA is abandoning crucial values by taking an increasingly large role in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation drive.
NANA's federal contracting is done under its Akima division, whose operating companies hold contracts to manage or provide security services to a half-dozen ICE detention facilities across the United States and Guantanamo Bay. That includes the Akima-managed Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, which has seen one of the most dramatic increases in people detained in the second Trump administration. People there have said they’ve been forced to sleep on floors and endure long waits for food and medical care. Since the start of the year, four people in ICE custody have died after being detained at Krome. They’re among the 19 who’ve died in ICE custody nationwide through mid-October, more than died in all of 2024 and the most since the Covid-19 pandemic raced through immigrant detention centers in 2020. (The figure doesn’t include two detained men who died in a shooting targeting a Dallas ICE facility last month.) At another Akima-managed detention center, near Buffalo, New York, federal inspectors repeatedly found that guards used “inappropriate” force. In a lawsuit, those detained there have alleged that they were subjected to forced labor.
Working for ICE “really goes contrary to our values, absolutely,” says Schaeffer, surrounded in his art studio by Christmas lights and fireweed, a native Alaskan plant that grows neon purple in the summer. NANA's board is “not acknowledging that’s what they have—a company that mistreats people of color.” Shareholders, he fears, “don’t connect the dots together that detention facilities like that are against our principles, our Iñupiat values that we live by—and that is to treat fellow human beings with respect.” ICE did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
NANA is one of 12 for-profit Alaska Native regional corporations created in 1971 by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. The company is able to secure its government contracts thanks to a decades-old initiative to prop up small businesses and what the federal government describes as “socially and economically disadvantaged” communities, including Alaska Natives. Without that set-aside program, NANA could have to go up against private-prison companies—such as GEO Group Inc. and CoreCivic Inc.—that operate the facilities holding the majority of people in ICE custody.
The program is a noteworthy example of a diversity and inclusion initiative that’s survived under a presidential administration committed to purging such efforts. The percentage of ICE contracts set aside for these companies grew slightly in 2025. NANA had $2.8 billion in revenue last year, about 80% of that from Akima, which has become the biggest recipient of ICE contracts issued under the program. The value of NANA's ICE contracts this year is approaching $300 million, an increase of about $100 million over last year, and with $45 billion allocated for creating more detention capacity under Trump’s immigration dragnet, Akima is in a position to reap even more gains. Regardless of how big NANA gets, it still qualifies for set-aside contracts. The company did not reply to a detailed list of questions about its Akima operations.
The company’s shareholders receive a regular dividend check; NANA has announced a fall dividend of $20 per share, following one of $8.05 in the spring. About 1.75 million outstanding NANA shares are distributed among its more than 15,000 shareholders. While the company doesn’t disclose typical holdings, that’s a rough average of 117 shares per shareholder, amounting to an annual dividend payout just shy of $3,300.
Some shareholders say the financial payoff isn’t worth the human toll. “Yeah, we get some money, but we also tarnish our culture, our people,” says David Leslie, a shareholder who lives in Fairbanks. The company is complicit in “acts of violence” he says, “and I can’t pay my rent.”
An informal Facebook poll in March about NANA's ICE contracts drew responses from around 100 shareholders, the majority of whom disapproved of the work. A few weeks after the poll, the company posted a statement on its website. It said NANA's detention facilities are “subject to continuous oversight and monitoring for the security and safety of everyone involved.” The NANA board chair, Piquk Linda Lee, added in the statement that the company has not deviated from its values and noted it is “limited in what we can share publicly about specific customers and contracts.”
On the other side of the continent, some 4,300 miles from Kotzebue, sits Krome, on the edge of Miami. ICE owns the facility, and Akima has operated it for more than a decade under a contract valued at more than a half-billion dollars. Florida’s law enforcement has been especially aggressive in aiding Trump’s immigration crackdown. As a result, Krome has at times been packed with more people than its official capacity. (In April ICE gave Akima a contract worth roughly $18 million for “temporary housing services” at Krome.) A report released by Human Rights Watch in July determined that Akima had repeatedly failed to provide minimally safe conditions—it was, for example, holding female immigrants in areas designed for men, without privacy barriers for toilets and access to showers. (Akima told Human Rights Watch it was unable to comment on “the specifics of our engagement.”) Several people detained at Krome and their lawyers told Bloomberg Businessweek that Akima’s guards were slow to respond to people in urgent need.
Ukrainian war refugee Maksym Chernyak was one of those people. In Kyiv, before the war, Chernyak liked to DJ and ski. He’d come to the US in August 2024 with his partner, Oksana Tarasiuk, who says they were allowed to enter on humanitarian grounds. In Florida he worked as a delivery driver and handyman until being arrested on a domestic violence charge. (Tarasiuk says it was nothing more than an argument that escalated when a neighbor called the cops.) Chernyak posted bail but never left jail. He was picked up by ICE and taken to Krome on Feb. 3.
Prior to his detention, Chernyak had been relatively healthy; at intake, medical records show, a nurse at Krome noted only that he had high blood pressure. (Health care at Krome is provided by the ICE Health Service Corps.) Almost immediately his health began to fail. He called Tarasiuk frequently, pleading for help. Guards at Krome largely ignored his requests to see a doctor, he told her. Chernyak said he spent his first few days in a small holding room—windowless, without running water or proper sleeping arrangements, designed to keep people briefly for processing. On calls with Tarasiuk, he said he wasn’t getting enough food or water and couldn’t sleep. He described feeling like his body was breaking down. “He was afraid he was going to die,” Tarasiuk says.
About two weeks after Chernyak first told guards he was ill, he began vomiting and shaking as he lay in his bunk, according to his medical records and eyewitness accounts. The guards didn’t respond for 20 to 30 minutes, according to those accounts. When they arrived, the guards helped a nurse lower Chernyak from his bunk into a wheelchair, but he shook so violently he couldn’t be held down. He slid out of the chair to the floor, and finally they put him on a stretcher. For almost three hours, Chernyak’s symptoms worsened. He eventually began having seizures every three to five minutes.
By the time staff called 911, almost four hours after Chernyak began vomiting in his bunk, it was too late. Doctors suspected he was brain dead by the time he got to a local emergency room; tests showed he’d possibly suffered a massive stroke. In less than two days, doctors took Chernyak off life support. He was 44. Tarasiuk has filed a wrongful death claim against the Department of Homeland Security, which the agency has not responded to. DHS also did not respond to questions for this article.
You can’t travel far in Kotzebue without seeing the NANA logo. There are two Alaska Air flights a day into town, landing near NANA's headquarters and a National Park Service center, where a taxidermied muskox greets visitors. On bulletin boards and walls in Kotzebue’s grocery stores are job postings and information on corporate philanthropy, such as fuel subsidies for shareholders. Some homes are lifted onto pilings, an effort to protect them from erosion and rising tides during increasingly frequent seasonal floods. Shipping containers sit in many yards. Once something lands in Kotzebue, it’s too expensive to ship it back out, and people try to find a use for it.
Many people here work for NANA, or used to, or want to. These are the local Alaska jobs, such as operating heavy machinery at the company’s zinc and lead mine, not the Akima gigs on the other side of the continent.
About two years into Trump’s first administration, shareholders brought concerns about conditions at the detention centers to the board. The board ordered management to perform an internal review of the ICE contracts, which took months, according to a former executive who was involved in the process but asked not to be identified, as the person still works in the industry. The company opted to keep the contracts, concluding that conditions were improving, Akima employees weren’t involved in any of the alleged abuses of concern to shareholders and the contracts didn’t violate their mission of respecting Iñupiat values, the former executive says.
Have a tip about contractors and immigration? Let us know here.
The internal review wasn’t widely publicized. Shareholders have become accustomed to the reluctance of NANA leaders to discuss the company’s role in immigrant detention. Unlike GEO and CoreCivic, which boast in their quarterly reports about their growing ICE revenue, NANA rarely acknowledges it. The company makes no mention of it in its annual reports to shareholders and Alaska regulators. The current president and CEO, John Aġnaaqłuk Lincoln, told Businessweek he couldn’t discuss the contracts with ICE because of national security concerns.
Nonetheless, more shareholders have come to realize how their dividend money is generated. Media reports, advocacy groups and US lawmakers have cited overcrowding and poor conditions at Akima-run detention centers. A small group of NANA shareholders have taken it upon themselves to share clips and articles on Facebook. “I never heard anything like that until this year,” says Suzanne Evans, a shareholder in Kotzebue. She first learned about Akima’s ICE work from a cousin’s Facebook post this spring. “That is sick. Setting up those detention centers is cruel.”
Native corporations were founded after Alaska Native leaders pushed for an alternative to the reservation system of the Lower 48. They’re more than businesses. “They’ve come to really represent the Alaska Native community and these cultural groups,” says Kimberly McGinnis, a University of Alaska Fairbanks assistant professor who wrote her dissertation on Alaska Native corporation governance. “Whether you’re a shareholder or not, the actions of that Alaska Native corporation really reflect on your identity.”
When they were first established, NANA and the other regional corporations looked closer to home for business opportunities. Much of it focused on supporting construction on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System and oilfield work more generally. By the mid-1980s, many Alaska Native corporations were struggling.
Congress offered a solution, extending a special program for small businesses to tribal nations and Alaska Native corporations. That program, known as 8(a), was meant to help socially and economically disadvantaged people and groups compete for government contracts. Government agencies could limit certain contracts to just these bidders, and often they didn’t have to compete against anyone at all. NANA has been doing work for the federal government going back to at least 1995, when it got a contract to provide services at West Point Military Academy. Today, Akima operates a slew of its own subsidiaries that can bid for 8(a) contracts.
Crucial to all that is Akima’s CEO and president, Bill Monet, a Virginia executive who’s worked in government contracting for decades.
NANA put all of its federal contracting business under the Akima umbrella in 2012 and placed Monet in charge. The Obama administration had been deporting a record number of immigrants. In November 2013, Akima hired a former assistant field office director for ICE. A contract to run Krome, held by a partnership that included another Alaska Native corporation, was nearing its end, and ICE invited any company that qualified for the 8(a) program to bid. Akima did just that. In April 2014, it won the contract—its first ICE detention deal, carrying a value of more than a half-billion dollars over the next 11 years. That same year, the company took over the contract to run the facility near Buffalo. More recently, under the Biden administration, Akima became the main contractor for the Port Isabel Service Processing Center in Texas. It notched another win when it was selected to provide security services at the portion of Guantanamo Bay used to detain immigrants.
Monet, who also serves as NANA's chief operating officer, has been paid handsomely for Akima’s success, earning almost $40 million in gross pay over the past six years. In 2024 he received $7.9 million, according to a proxy statement filed by the company. That was roughly $2 million more than the total compensation of the then-CEO of GEO, the biggest private prison operator in the country. In addition to his roles within NANA, Monet operates an independent company that has leased an airplane to Akima, which paid his company more than $1.7 million over five years. These related-party transactions were disclosed by the company in corporate filings. (NANA did not make Monet available for an interview.)
NANA subsidiaries have secured contracts worth nearly $1.2 billion to work with ICE over the past decade, according to government contracting data compiled by Bloomberg Government. More than 80% of that was through contracts available only to 8(a) companies. Akima is ICE’s largest recipient of 8(a) contracts, accounting for almost 60% of the agency set-asides for that program over the past 10 years.
By the time personnel at the Buffalo (Batavia) Service Processing Center in New York arranged for Chidi Nwagbo to see the surgeon for his frostbite, it was too late.
Nwagbo, a 57-year-old Nigerian, had lost feeling in his fingers during a midwinter crossing on foot from New York into Canada. He’d come to the US in 1988 for college and overstayed his student visa. He built a life in Ohio, raising five American-born children, but as 2025 arrived he feared being caught in an immigration sweep. He hoped Canada, where his brother lived, would grant him a visa, allowing him to stay relatively close to his kids.
He paid a human smuggler $2,000 to get him to the border. But the man dropped him off some distance away—he doesn’t know how far—and told him to walk. It was the first of February. Nwagbo got bogged down in the snow. He lost his left glove. When he was certain he’d entered Canada, he called 911. The Canadian border officials who found him didn’t welcome him, as he’d hoped. Instead, they turned him over to their US counterparts, saying they couldn’t reach his brother to confirm his story.
Doctors told Nwagbo his fingers could be saved—he just needed to see a frostbite specialist. US Customs and Border Protection didn’t arrange that, however, before delivering Nwagbo to ICE’s Batavia facility on Feb. 11. For weeks, he says, he pleaded with the guards and medical personnel at Batavia to arrange for him to get care from a specialist. They finally did in late March, but by then some of the fingers had turned black or blue and blisters had formed. The damage was done. A surgeon amputated three fingers and parts of three others. “The doctor didn’t even try to save them,” Nwagbo says. “He said the window had closed.”
In July, Nwagbo filed a claim against ICE alleging that negligent medical care cost him his fingers. Emails show that ICE transferred the claim to CBP, which is reviewing it. ICE referred questions about the claim to CBP, which did not reply to a request for comment for this article.
There have been allegations of abuses at Batavia for years. Federal government inspection reports document that Akima guards unnecessarily used pepper spray and force to remove people from their cells repeatedly over the past two years. (ICE responded to one of the reports by updating its Use of Force policy and implementing annual de-escalation training.) A February 2025 analysis by the nonprofit news outlet Investigative Post found that people placed in solitary confinement at the facility were held there, on average, for 25 days, 10 days longer than is considered torture in the state of New York. (Batavia, a federal facility, is not subject to that state restriction.)
In 2020, Akima was sued over a work program in which immigrants participate in jobs like cooking and cleaning around Batavia in exchange for $1 a day in commissary credit. The program calls for the work to be voluntary; the lawsuit accused Akima of forcing people to do these tasks in some cases. Akima has denied the allegations, and the case hasn’t yet gone to trial. “It's my knowledge and belief, whatever, that AGS has never forced or coerced any detainee to work a detail that they did not want to do,” Laura Mitchell, president of Akima Global Services, the unit that operates Batavia, said in a deposition. “They have to pick up after themselves,” she added. “It’s not a hotel.”
When he arrived at Batavia, Nwagbo says, he saw more people than beds. Those with no bed, including him, were given a thin foam mat to sleep on the floor. “Overcrowding was a daily issue,” Nwagbo says. “They were just overwhelmed.” He was held at the facility until summer, when he was transferred to another ICE facility, in Louisiana. In July he was put on a plane, in shackles, for a multi-stop 38-hour flight to Lagos.
The Trump administration has said it plans to expand detention capacity to 100,000 beds or more. In May, ICE short-listed more than 40 companies that would be eligible to bid on the expansion projects. Akima made the cut. Those new facilities won’t always look like traditional detention centers. In its quest for speed, the administration has championed temporary camps, using tents on military bases across the country. In August, ICE started detaining people on the Fort Bliss Army base in Texas. Akima has been tapped to provide security services there, according to people familiar with the contract, as well as recent job postings on Akima’s website.
NANA has 23 board directors. All but two must have a residence in an Alaska Native village in NANA territory. Directors are elected by shareholders in a proxy vote and serve three-year terms. In theory, these are the people who could direct change at NANA, but so far concerns over ICE contracts haven’t prompted the board to do so.
When one shareholder, based in the Lower 48, sent an email in March to the company expressing her disapproval of the contracts, she didn’t get an answer for a few months. Eventually, the board’s chair, Lee, replied in a one-page letter. It said board members had done “site visits” and found no issues: “We remain confident that our operations are in full compliance with our moral commitment to human dignity and reflect who we are as Iñupiaq.” Media reports of misconduct, Lee wrote, were incorrect.
In late July shareholders had an opportunity to speak directly to board members and NANA leadership at a community meeting in the village of Deering. The meeting was intended to cover general business matters, but some shareholders had something specific on their minds. Several pressed the board on why Akima continued to work for ICE.
“I care deeply about what happens to our community, to our people, and how NANA leads. Right now I have a lot of concerns about the subsidiary Akima,” said Roo Qallaq Ramos, a shareholder who dialed into the conference call from Washington state. “I am asking and hoping for leadership from NANA to really assess whether those relationships are worth the financial windfall that’s clearly coming our way.”
—With Desiree Hagen, Fola Akinnibi and Sophie Alexander
Editor's note: This story was reported in collaboration with KOTZ and Alaska Public Media. KOTZ, a partner station of Alaska Public Media, has received donations from local businesses, including NANA, in the past.