Demand justice for Haitian who died in ICE custody in Broward
League member Rev. M. Theolene “Theo” Johnson wrote the following op-ed published in the Sun Sentinel May 20.
Marie Ange Blaise was 44 years old when she died in her cell at the Broward Transitional Center on April 25, 2025. She was not a criminal. She was not a threat. She was a human being who, like so many of us, was seeking a better life. She came to this country with hope, but instead, she found herself incarcerated without due process, ignored when she cried out for help, and ultimately left to die alone. It could have been me. It could have been any of us.
I know this because I was once in that same detention center. I was held in that very same space — isolated, frightened and voiceless. Like Marie Ange, I was taken from everything I knew — my family, my home, my support system — and placed in a system that treated me like less than human.
I arrived at BTC on Jan. 2, 2005, just a month after suffering a medical emergency. I had lost a pregnancy and was hemorrhaging, and had to undergo an emergency procedure under anesthesia on Dec. 3, 2004. I was still recovering, and yet I was processed into detention without so much as a second glance at my physical state. There was no time to grieve, no time to heal — only fear, confusion and cold air. I was scared. I didn’t know what would happen to me, only that ICE had taken me, and I might be deported to a country I hadn’t known since childhood.
Inside, the experience was dehumanizing. You become a number. If you spoke English, you were treated with suspicion by fellow detainees who didn’t. I was Haitian, but many others didn’t see me as one of them. I’d come to the U.S. at 13 and had assimilated so much that English had become my dominant language, while my Creole had faded until I had to later relearn it. I became isolated.