ICE is paying an Anchorage company to wire the 11th floor of a building in Washington

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will pay an Anchorage company $31,049 to run power and data wiring on the 11th floor of a building in Washington, D.C. The work starts Aug. 31 and has to be finished by Oct. 8. None of it happens in Alaska.

The company is Holitna Construction, LLC, which lists an address on B Street in Anchorage. Federal award records classify it as an Alaska Native corporation-owned firm, a tribally owned firm and a participant in the Small Business Administration's 8(a) program for disadvantaged businesses. Its federal work is mostly the unglamorous interior of government buildings: furniture installation, initial outfitting of new facilities, painting, wiring.

That combination is the reason an Anchorage company is pulling cable in a federal building 3,300 miles away. Firms owned by Alaska Native corporations occupy a distinct position in the 8(a) program, which lets federal agencies hand them sole-source contracts without the dollar ceiling that applies to other disadvantaged businesses. It is a preference Congress wrote for the benefit of Alaska Native shareholders, and it puts Alaska-registered companies on federal job sites in every state.

The order is a sliver of Holitna's federal business. The company holds about $170.9 million across 129 awards, most of it from the Defense Department. About $21 million of that work, roughly 12 percent, has been performed in Alaska. California accounts for $65.5 million, more than three times as much.

Some of the Alaska-performed work is recent. The State Department gave Holitna a separate $240,142 furnishing and installation order running through Dec. 31, 2027, to be carried out in Alaska. Several ICE orders have been performed here as well, including a $124,325 security systems purchase.