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.

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