Two members of Congress said Friday their efforts to learn more about the death of a detainee at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Broward were stonewalled by staff at the facility.
Their questions about the medical care at the Broward Transitional Center were met with “hostility and evasiveness,” U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick told reporters outside the center after she and U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson spent an hour and 35 minutes inside.
The facility’s staff “refused to give us complete and clear answers,” Cherfilus-McCormick said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is at the forefront of President Donald Trump’s efforts to round up and deport people who aren’t in the country legally, hasn’t provided much information about the death of Marie Ange Blaise, a 44-year-old Haitian citizen.
ICE posted a “detainee death notification” press release on Tuesday. It said Blaise was in its custody when “pronounced deceased by medical professionals” at the Broward Transitional Center on April 25, at 8:35 p.m. “The cause of death is under investigation.”
That prompted the congressional visit. Cherfilus-McCormick, who represents most of the African American and Caribbean American communities in Broward and Palm Beach counties, is the only Haitian American member of Congress. Wilson, who represents South Broward and Miami-Dade counties, represents Miami’s Little Haiti community. Both are Democrats.
If conditions at the Broward facility and other ICE locations around the country persist, Cherfilus-McCormick and Wilson said, there would be more cases like Blaise — ending in detainee deaths.
“Marie is just an example of what is going to continue to happen,” Wilson said. “This is something we’re going to continue to see. It’s going to get more crowded. It’s going to continue to have more deaths. It’s going to continue to have more children without their parents.”
“We must speak out. We must protest. We must let people know that this is wrong, that these people are human beings, that they are not to be caged like animals,” she added.
Cherfilus-McCormick said what she saw inside the facility was “heartbreaking.”
“This is not working. Marie Blaise wasn’t just a one-off,” Cherfilus-McCormick said. “This is not humane. Everything about it is very cruel and very, very unusual and peculiar.”
Cherfilus-McCormick said there are “well over 500 people” at the center, but she couldn’t get a precise count.
“I specifically asked them how many people are here today and they would not answer,” she said. “Instead, they wanted to give us a tour of empty bedrooms. They want us to take us into the chapel to show us how pretty the facility is. This is not about a facility being pretty. This is about how you are treating these women who are here and everybody else who’s here in this facility.”
People have been detained at the facility for what she said are “little incidents and infractions,” including one person who was in the U.S. for more than 25 years — and whose daughter is in the military — who’s been at the transitional center waiting to be processed for five months.
The main focus of the visit, they said, was to try to find out about health care services at the facility in general, and find out as much as they could about Blaise’s death.
Cherfilus-McCormick said she was told by the medical coordinator that there is one “on-call” doctor for the facility. When the congresswomen began pressing for details, she said, their inquiries were shut down.
“We asked her several questions about what is her procedure, and she became very hostile, didn’t want to answer questions. So we asked a little bit more. Well, how many people, how many doctors do you have? She said one. When we started asking more about that doctor, she refused to answer that question.
“Then when we asked about how many health care professionals, she stopped answering questions. And you could see that she was physically upset and didn’t want to respond any longer,” Cherfilus-McCormick said.
The lawmakers said they spoke with four detainees with specific knowledge of what happened to Blaise. “They told us how she complained of chest pain regularly … for quite a few days,” Cherfilus-McCormick said. On the morning of her death she was given a prescription, but the pain continued.
“If you had persistent heart pain, chest pain, why was there no EKG? Why wasn’t she sent to the hospital?” she asked.
ICE said in its April 29 announcement that it “provided email notification of Blaise’s death” to the Haitian consulate in Miami.
Wilson said the members of Congress haven’t been able to find out much about Blaise or her family. She said her staff was able to track down Blaise’s 22-year-old son via phone in California but he “instantly became so upset” — possibly, she said, fearing the call was being traced or the government would try to find him “because he might have been undocumented” — that he didn’t provide much information.
ICE’s initial statement about the death provided some details about Blaise.
The agency said it didn’t know when or where Blaise entered the United States “without admission or parole.”
On Feb. 12, U.S. Customs and Border Protection stopped her at the airport in Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, attempting to board a flight to Charlotte, N.C.
On Feb. 14, CBP transferred her to ICE custody in San Juan, Puerto Rico. On Feb. 21, ICE transferred her to Richwood Correctional Center in Oakdale, La.
On April 5, she was transferred to ICE’s Miami division, which put her at the Broward Transitional Center.
ICE said it notified the inspector general’s office for its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility, about the death.
Wilson scoffed at the notion of those offices investigating what happened because, she said, so many of their staffers have been fired since Trump took office in January.
Cherfilus-McCormick and Wilson said there should be some kind of external investigation into the death.
ICE didn’t immediately respond to questions Friday about Blaise or what Cherfilus-McCormick and Wilson reported from their visit. Neither did the GEO Group, the national private prison company based in Boca Raton, which has the contract to operate the facility.
Wilson said GEO Group’s contract should be canceled.
The facility is on Powerline Road in Deerfield Beach. The nearest major landmark is the Monarch Hill landfill, more commonly known as Mount Trashmore.
In the press release, ICE said it cares for detainees.
“ICE remains committed to ensuring that all those in its custody reside in safe, secure, and humane environments. Comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive and throughout the entirety of their stay. All people in ICE custody receive medical, dental and mental health screening and 24-hour emergency care at each detention facility. At no time during detention is a detained illegal alien denied emergent care,” the statement said.
GEO Group uses similar language about “a safe, secure, and humane environment.”
Tessa Petit, a native of Haiti who is executive director of the Florida Immigration Coalition, said the Trump administration has “declared hunting season on immigrants” and is “failing to provide the minimum safety and basic needs to those in their care.”
Petit and Mary Estimé-Irvin, a city of North Miami council member, and chair of the National Haitian American Elected Officials Network, joined Cherfilus-McCormick and Wilson outside the facility, but only the lawmakers and their staffers were allowed inside.
Estimé-Irvin said Blaise’s name “must not be forgotten. Her story must not be ignored. The death of Marie Ange Blaise raises serious troubling questions about the treatment of individuals in federal custody.”
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.