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By: Corinne Smith, Alaska Beacon
After a Fox News interview raised the possibility of Alaska building a “Bear Alcatraz” Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility, the office of Gov. Mike Dunleavy said on Tuesday that the state has no such plans.
The Dunleavy administration statement was prompted by an inaccurate story by Newsweek that summarized the interview, asserting that the state had suggested the idea.
“The story is false,” said Jeff Turner, Dunleavy’s director of communications by email. He said that he had demanded a correction from the Newsweek reporter.
The Newsweek story referred to a July 1 interview on Fox News by host Laura Ingraham of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for pPolicy and homeland security adviser. Miller is known as the architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and a vocal proponent of ramping up ICE arrests, detention and mass deportations.
In the interview, Ingraham and Miller praised Florida for building a new ICE detention facility in the Everglades, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” for its isolation and being surrounded by wildlife in the Big Cypress Natural Preserve in Ochopee, Florida. It was constructed in just eight days, and can hold up to 3,000 detainees before deportation, and opened last week.
Miller said he had pitched all Republican governors to build similar ICE detention facilities. “We want every governor of a red state, and if you’re watching tonight, pick up the phone call, DHS, work with us to build facilities in your state,” Miller said.
Ingraham said Fox reached out to states, including Alaska, for comment. “Alaska told us that ‘we don’t have alligators, but we have lots of bears.’ However, they aren’t aware of any plans for an Alaska version,” she said.
“Of, I said, ‘Bear Alcatraz,’” Ingraham added, chuckling.
When asked to comment on Alaska’s response to Fox News, Turner repeated there were no state plans to build such a facility.
“I am not aware of any response from the state to Mr. Miller for a facility like the one in Florida,” Turner said. “The governor’s office was asked by Fox News if there were any such plans and the answer was no.”
Last week, President Donald Trump signed his signature domestic policy bill, dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which allocates a historic increase of $165 billion to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which administers ICE, through 2029. ICE’s budget is currently $10 billion.
The Department of Homeland Security said $165 billion includes $45 billion for new ICE detention facilities, $46 billion for border wall construction along the U.S.-Mexico border, $14 billion for deportation operations, and billions for hiring 6,000 new Customs and Border Patrol agents, and 10,000 new ICE agents.
The first-ever Bitcoin Alaska Conference was held July 5–6 at Centennial Hall in Juneau.
The conference brought together policymakers, energy experts, and Bitcoin enthusiasts to examine the role of cryptocurrency in shaping Alaska’s economy and energy future.
One of those experts was Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation.
Alex Gladstein offers an argument for technology as a critical tool for individual empowerment and freedom in an increasingly complex global landscape.
“So the organization that I worked for, the Human Rights Foundation, was founded with a very specific mission, which was to address authoritarianism.” Said Gladstein , “5.7 billion people live under an authoritarian regime in nearly 100 countries around the world, where they don’t have free speech, rule of law, separation of powers, or property rights. So while our country is not perfect, it is something that you know, billions of people aspire to, and we focus on helping human rights activists, journalists, labor leaders and environmentalists, who live under authoritarian regimes. And that often brings us to look at what the tools are that they’re using.”
Gladstein, working with the Human Rights Foundation since 2007, has witnessed firsthand the power of technology in some of the world’s most restrictive environments. His journey began with underground internet efforts in Cuba, where he and his team would smuggle contraband media and help citizens access information forbidden by authoritarian regimes.
The conversation centers on two primary technological innovations: Bitcoin and open-source AI tools. Bitcoin he says, emerges as a powerful instrument of financial sovereignty.
“even the most hardened skeptic admits that it’s got some sort of speculative investment quality to it, given that it’s been the best performing financial asset in the world since it was created, I think there’s a risk in ending the story there. I mean, that’s really what a lot of people see. They see an investment, and that’s about it.” Said Gladstein “I think what they don’t see is the freedom money part of it, which is that it doesn’t require paperwork to use. You don’t need an account. You can be any gender, any faith, any religion, any nationality, and you can use it and connect to it and trade and commerce and transact with other people. The second part of it is the censorship resistance. You know, it’s unstoppable.”
In Alaska, particularly in the North Slope, where abundant “stranded” natural gas from oil production could power cryptocurrency data centers, Stax Capital Partners, a Wasilla-based startup, recently proposed building a 50 MW Bitcoin mining facility south of Prudhoe Bay, about the same amount of electricity used as Alaska’s largest coal plant, according to the Alaska Beacon.
A New York Times investigation found that U.S. Bitcoin mining operations can require power comparable to small cities, and during crises like Texas’ 2021 Winter Storm Uri, some operations were actually paid to shut down to protect vulnerable power grids, Critics warn that large-scale installations, like those proposed in Alaska, risk similar grid strain and could push fossil fuel consumption higher.
On the technology front, according to Gladstein, it’s a double-edged sword. “there’s the centralizing force of the state, and they are using AI tools to better understand their population, map their population, surveil their population. But at the same time, these open AI tools that are available to anybody, are allowing individuals to have, essentially, a fortune 500 company in their pocket.”
Gladstein acknowledges the risks of digital intrusion and recommends people spend more time offline to reduce their digital surface area as these same technologies can pose a threat to individual privacy.
Yet, he remains fundamentally optimistic about technology’s potential to expand human freedom. “It’s going to be super empowering for individuals and small businesses that don’t have a lot of resources. I’m excited about that.”
By: Corinne Smith, Alaska Beacon
The budget vetoes that Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy issued last month included millions of dollars proposed by the Legislature to bolster child care and early intervention services for children with disabilities or developmental delays.
Dunleavy vetoed a proposed $1.86 million in additional funding for child care grant programs and place-based and home-based child care centers, citing declining state revenues. The budget retains $5.87 million for those programs for next year.
For early education and infant learning, the Legislature proposed a significant boost — $5.7 million more — for the state’s 17 programs that provide intervention services for families with children from infancy to 3 years old experiencing disabilities or developmental delays. Dunleavy rejected the increase, and allocated $10 million for the statewide programs.
“Governor Dunleavy’s goal is for Alaska to be the best place in the country to raise a family,” said Grant Robinson, a deputy press secretary for the governor in an email on Monday responding to a request for comment. “The budgeting process requires the Governor to consider all line items in view of the State’s fiscal situation. The budget the Governor signed still provides more than $5.8 million of funding for childcare benefits. Given the State’s revenue outlook, the Governor made the difficult yet fiscally responsible decision to veto increasing and expanding infant learning programs.”
The governor vetoed more than $127 million from the Legislature’s proposed budget, including $50 million for public schools. In a prerecorded video released with the veto announcement in June, Dunleavy cited lower state revenues due to falling oil prices.
“Basically, we don’t have enough money to pay for all of our obligations. So as a result of that, you’re going to see some reductions in this year’s budget. It’s not an easy thing to do. It’s certainly not a fun thing to do, but it’s necessary,” he said.
Anchorage Republican Sen. Cathy Giessel, who also serves as the Senate majority leader, agreed that the state is facing fiscal challenges, but said child care and early education programs should be prioritized, as the Legislature had proposed.
“We had a balanced budget. It is true, it was very difficult to arrive at that balanced budget,” she said in a phone interview. “We searched all the couch cushions for one-time funding to fund this balanced budget, but we achieved it. The governor’s vetoes of these two critical services are just going to mean future costs, because these services were not provided for kids in their earliest development stages. So I was very disappointed.”
An estimated 1,800 Alaskan families are currently served each year by the state’s infant learning programs, funded by the state and federal Medicaid, at no cost to families. Children and families work with developmental specialists, and can receive speech, physical and occupational therapies. In addition, parents receive training and education on child development.
For example, in the Northwest Arctic region, an early learning and family program is administered by the Northwest Arctic Borough School District. It is based in Kotzebue and serves all the Northwest Arctic villages, as well as Point Hope in the North Slope Borough.
“We’re spread very thin,” said Tracey Schaeffer, one of the program’s three staff members. “And we definitely could use another staff person to help with traveling and seeing families and spending time in the villages.”
There is only one air carrier, Bering Air, serving the region, down from four companies operating a few years ago, she said, so with weather events and disruptions, it’s increasingly challenging.
“We have to change reservations a lot because of the weather,” she said, estimating the total cost for travel and flights at up to $25,000 per year, plus significant time. “As it gets warmer, we have a lot more days that are not very safe to fly here.”
Schaeffer said they work as much as possible by phone, but intervention services are very personal. “And all the while, you’re trying to kind of build a relationship with this family, because it’s a really intimate, sensitive situation when you’re working with a family who has a child that experienced, you know, something that wasn’t expected, a disability, or something, a medical issue, that has put their development at risk,” she said.
The proposed state funding increase would have been welcome, she said. “That would have been a huge relief, because there’s a lot of pressure. I mean, (with) early intervention, three years is a short period of time, you know, and we lose so much time because of weather, flight cancellations or something,” she said. “So there’s a lot of pressure there. We’ve done this job for a long time, and we know the time goes fast, and we want to provide as much intervention as we can. And it’s just hard to do that.”
Schaeffer also runs a small child care center in Kotzebue, serving eight children, the first licensed provider to open in the community in over a decade. She said more local and state support is needed to address the lack of child care and rippling impacts for the community. “We lose people all the time because of a lack of child care. You know, we have educators or providers that come and they start a family, and then they realize, like, ‘Wow, I can’t find a child care provider,’ and we lose them because of that.”
Shaeffer and her daughter opened the child care center in 2023, a challenging process documented in a short film by Laura Norton-Cruz, a social worker, public health advocate and film producer. She and filmmaker Joshua Albeza Branstetter created a documentary film series focused on the challenges of child care and early education programs called the “Early Childhood in Alaska” series.
“Child care is just not a profitable business model. It’s an investment in child brain development and family well-being, and the economy,” Norton-Cruz said, emphasizing the need for increasing state and federal funding support. “Staffing is the majority of the costs. But also, if you run a home-based child care center, you have to pay your mortgage or you have to pay rent, you have to pay utilities: Those things cost money. And we need support from the government to be able to offer this essential service, to have a workforce, and to have children who are kindergarten ready.”
In April, Anchorage’s largest child care provider, Bright Beginnings Early Learning Center, closed, displacing 125 children. Norton-Cruz said while some progress has been made, like raising awareness around Alaska’s child care crisis, families and providers are still struggling.
“Others have cut back on hours or cut back on the number of rooms, or the number of kids they can take, in order to have this essential service for parents to be able to go to work, which we need them to do,” she said. “Because we have major workforce shortages, and parents need income to pay for, you know, rent and everything else, we have to do a better job of funding and supporting the sector.”
In 2023, Dunleavy launched a child care task force with the stated goal to develop a plan to improve availability and affordability of quality child care throughout Alaska. Norton-Cruz said the work of the task force was positive, and would like to see the governor put more state funding toward its recommendations.
“When we don’t have policy that supports child care and early childhood, we basically just rely on the unpaid labor of women,” Norton-Cruz said. “Whether that’s moms, or whether that’s grandmothers, or aunties, you can’t just say, ‘Oh, but grandmas and aunties can step in.’ That’s not policy. That relies on something that may not always be there for everyone, and isn’t fair. … People need to be able to make that choice, rather than have that choice made for them.”
Giessel also said there is a need for state funding for the governor’s own task force recommendations. She pointed to new state revenue measures that Dunleavy has opposed —like oil taxes — that leaders in the Alaska House multipartisan and Senate bipartisan majority caucuses want to pursue to bring in more state dollars.
“First of all, we have a huge gap in our tax structure on our oil resources,” Giessel said, referring to the difference between taxes paid by traditional corporations and by those corporations that report their income through their owners, known as “S corporations.”
“The S corporations pay no corporate tax to the state,” Giessel said. “There is legislation that would institute a requirement for S corporations to pay a corporate tax to the state, conservatively estimated, that would be $100 million per year.”
A bill to tax these corporations is in the Senate Rules Committee.
“That would pay for a huge amount of these child care and early education funding requirements,” Giessel said.
“For him to say that these cuts are because of declining revenue and ignoring his responsibility in this, is just amazing to me,” Giessel added.
The Legislature will meet for a special session on Aug. 2, when they will consider whether to override the budget vetoes.
The Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a big win on June 27, 2025, by limiting the ability of judges to block Trump administration policies across the nation.
But Trump has not fared nearly as well in the lower courts, where he has lost a series of cases through different levels of the federal court system. On June 5, a single judge temporarily stopped the administration from preventing Harvard University from enrolling international students.
And a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade blocked Trump on May 28 from imposing tariffs on China and other nations. The Trump administration has appealed this decision. It will be taken up in July by all 11 judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
After that, the case can be appealed to the Supreme Court.
I’m a scholar of the federal courts. The reasons why some courts have multiple judges and others have a single judge can be confusing. Here’s a guide to help understand what’s going on in the federal courts.
Federal District Courts
The U.S. District Courts are the trial courts in the federal system and hear about 400,000 cases per year. A single judge almost always presides over cases.
This makes sense for a jury trial, since a judge might make dozens of spur-of-the-moment decisions during the course of a trial, such as ruling on a lawyer’s objection to a question asked of a witness. If a panel of, say, three judges performed this task, it would prolong proceedings because the three judges would have to deliberate over every ruling.
A more controversial role of District Courts involves setting nationwide injunctions. This happens when a single judge temporarily stops the government from enforcing a policy throughout the nation.
There have been more than two dozen nationwide injunctions during Trump’s second term. These involve policy areas as diverse as ending birthright citizenship, firing federal employees and banning transgender people from serving in the military.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Trump and Republicans in Congress argue that the ability to issue nationwide injunctions gives too much power to a single judge. Instead, they believe injunctions should apply only to the parties involved in the case.
On June 27, the Supreme Court agreed with the Trump administration and severely limited the ability of District Court judges to issue nationwide injunctions. This means that judges can generally stop policies from being enforced only against the parties to a lawsuit, instead of everyone in the nation.
In rare instances, a panel of three District Court judges hears a case. Congress decides what cases these special three-judge panels hear, reserving them for especially important issues. For example, these panels have heard cases involving reapportionment, which is how votes are translated into legislative seats in Congress and state legislatures, and allegations that a voter’s rights have been violated.
The logic behind having three judges hear such important cases is that they will give more careful consideration to the dispute. This may lend legitimacy to a controversial decision and prevents a single judge from exercising too much power.
There are also specialized courts that hear cases involving particular policies, sometimes in panels of three judges. For instance, three-judge panels on the U.S. Court of International Trade decide cases involving executive orders related to international trade.
The federal Court of Appeals
The U.S. Court of Appeals hears appeals from the District Courts and specialized courts.
The 13 federal circuit courts that make up the U.S. Court of Appeals are arranged throughout the country and handle about 40,000 cases per year. Each circuit court has six to 29 judges. Cases are decided primarily by three-judge panels.
Having multiple judges decide cases on the Court of Appeals is seen as worthwhile, since these courts are policymaking institutions. This means they set precedents for the judicial circuit in which they operate, which covers three to nine states.
Supporters of this system argue that by having multiple judges on appellate courts, the panel will consider a variety of perspectives on the case and collaborate with one another. This can lead to better decision-making. Additionally, having multiple judges check one another can boost public confidence in the judiciary.
The party that loses a case before a three-judge panel can request that the entire circuit rehear the case. This is known as sitting en banc.
Because judges on a circuit can decline to hear cases en banc, this procedure is usually reserved for especially significant cases. For instance, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has agreed to an en banc hearing to review the Court of International Trade’s decision to temporarily halt Trump’s sweeping tariff program. It also allowed the tariffs to remain in effect until the appeal plays out, likely in August.
The exception to having the entire circuit sit together en banc is the 9th Circuit, based in San Francisco, which has 29 judges, far more than other circuit courts. It uses an 11-judge en banc process, since having 29 judges hear cases together would be logistically challenging.
CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images
The US Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court sits atop the American legal system and decides about 60 cases per year.
Cases are decided by all nine justices, unless a justice declines to participate because of a conflict of interest. As with other multimember courts, advocates of the nine-member makeup argue that the quality of decision-making is improved by having many justices participate in a case’s deliberation.
Each Supreme Court justice is charged with overseeing one or more of the 13 federal circuits. In this role, a single justice reviews emergency appeals from the District Courts and an appellate court within a circuit. This authorizes them to put a temporary hold on the implementation of policies within that circuit or refer the matter to the entire Supreme Court.
In February, for example, Chief Justice John Roberts blocked a Court of Appeals order that would have compelled the Trump administration to pay nearly US$2 billion in reimbursements for already completed foreign aid work.
In March, a 5-4 majority of the high court sent the case back to U.S. District Judge Amir Ali, who subsequently ordered the Trump administration to release some of the funds.
The federal judicial system is complex. The flurry of executive orders from the Trump administration means that cases are being decided on a nearly daily basis by a variety of courts.
A single judge will decide some of these cases, and others are considered by full courts. Though the nine justices of the Supreme Court technically have the final say, the sheer volume of legal challenges means that America’s District Courts and Court of Appeals will resolve many of the disputes.
Paul M. Collins Jr. does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Politics + Society – The Conversation