Analysis
Questionable arrests, deaths in private prisons and a wall of silence
‘Marie Blaise’s death is the result of cruel and inhumane policies and treatment of immigrants. We will keep pushing the Administration for answers on behalf of those who are detained, trapped without adequate care or a fair trial.’
Marie Ange Blaise, a 44-year-old Haitian woman, died on April 25 while held at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Deerfield Beach, Florida. She had been in ICE custody for 71 days, accused of entering the country illegally.
The Deerfield Beach detention center is owned by GEO Group, a private corporation that runs around 100 prisons nationwide, with a budget of roughly $4 billion – and against which there were protests on Saturday in Newark, with the participation of the city's mayor, against the building of a new local detention center. GEO Group manages many centers on behalf of ICE. So far the agency has refused to release information on Marie Blaise’s death, saying only that detainees receive basic medical care when needed.
In this case, it appears that did not happen. According to the testimony of another detainee, Blaise began complaining of chest pain in the early afternoon on Friday, April 25, repeatedly asking to see a doctor. According to the initial reconstructions of the events, staff measured her blood pressure and found severe hypertension, then gave her medication and told her to sleep. After a few hours she awoke, crying for help and complaining of severe chest pain. Paramedics pronounced her dead at 8:35 p.m.
Her death, and ICE’s evasive attitude towards scrutiny in her case, has triggered outrage from migrant-rights groups and Democratic officials. Guerline Jozef, director of Haitian Bridge Alliance, an NGO that offers support to migrants from the Caribbean island, said that “Marie Blaise’s death is the result of cruel and inhumane policies and treatment of immigrants. We will keep pushing the Administration for answers on behalf of those who are detained, trapped without adequate care or a fair trial. We demand full transparency into Ms. Blaise’s death.”
Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Haitian-American Democrat whose district includes Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, managed to obtain permission to enter the Deerfield center to shed light on Marie Blaise’s death, but was met with what she called a “wall of silence” that withheld all information from her. “Truthfully, it should be a simple conversation: ‘This is our protocol. This is what we did so we can answer it.’ Never in my life have I asked about protocol and had agency officials refuse and turn hostile,” she accused.
Blaise had been arrested on February 14 while boarding a flight from the U.S. Virgin Islands – a United States territory, like Puerto Rico and Guam – to Charlotte, North Carolina. She was moved from a jail in Puerto Rico to a detention center in Oakdale, Louisiana, and finally to Florida on April 5, in a two-and-a-half-month ordeal. The legality of the arrest itself is in doubt: flights between U.S. territories are considered domestic, thus requiring no immigration documents.
“We are seeing people arrested while travelling from the U.S. Virgin Islands, from Puerto Rico, potentially even from Hawaii,” Jozef pointed out. “Agents don’t grasp that these people have not crossed an international border and should not be flagged as entering the United States illegally — they are already in the United States.”
Marie Blaise’s death is not an isolated case. Since January at least three people have died while in ICE custody in Florida. On February 20, Maksym Chernyak, a 44-year-old Ukrainian, suffered a heart attack at the Miami-Dade detention center and died after guards reportedly waited almost an hour before calling for help. Chernyak had managed to survive the Russian invasion, helped evacuate groups of women and children to safety from Kyiv and finally fled the war by crossing the border into Poland.
About a month earlier, in January, 29-year-old Honduran Genry Ruiz-Guillen was reported by ICE to have died of “complications of a schizoaffective disorder” – a finding rejected by the pathologist who performed his autopsy. “The diagnosis released by ICE does not answer how he died. What I found in the autopsy was too many drugs in his system,” said forensic pathologist Michael Baden, who also conducted the autopsy on George Floyd.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/morti-sommerse-dei-migranti on 2025-05-09