On April 25, 2025, Marie Ange Blaise, a 44-year-old Haitian woman, died in U.S. immigration custody after repeatedly asking for help. She had been complaining of chest pain. Witnesses say her blood pressure was dangerously high. Medical staff gave her pills and told her to lie down.
She never got back up.
Marie died that evening at the Broward Transitional Center, an ICE facility in Florida run by the private prison company GEO Group. It was only her 20th day there. She had already been shuffled through three facilities in three states, from Puerto Rico to Louisiana to Florida, after being stopped in the U.S. Virgin Islands for boarding a domestic flight without a visa.
She wasn’t a criminal. She wasn’t a threat. She was a human being.
When I Say This Is Systemic, This Is What I Mean
This wasn’t some freak, unpredictable event. It was preventable. It was a slow, systemic failure dressed up as procedure. ICE calls what happened “a death under investigation.”
But what we know already tells a story of medical neglect that’s become all too familiar in detention centers across the country.
Just a month before Marie’s death, I published a piece titled “The Urgent Humanitarian Crisis at Krome Detention Center.” In it, I asked a question I’m now forced to ask again:
How many people have to die in ICE custody before we call it what it is?
At Krome, three people died in three months. Maksym Chernyak. Genry Ruiz Guillen. Ramesh Amechand. Vomiting, seizing, pleading for help & ignored until it was too late. Meanwhile, ICE released the same tired PR line: “We are committed to humane and safe care.”
Safe? Humane?
Tell that to Marie Ange Blaise. Tell that to the women wrongfully held at Krome, shackled for hours, told to urinate on the floor, denied food and water, and forced to sleep on concrete with no blanket. One of them was told to fake a seizure if she wanted medical attention.
And now, just weeks later, another name is added to the list. Another life is gone. Another immigrant woman silenced by a system that doesn’t see her pain as real or her life as worth saving.
This Wasn’t an Accident. It Was Policy in Action.
ICE claims that “all detainees receive 24-hour emergency care.”
That statement is not just misleading. Frankly, it’s insulting. Marie didn’t die because she hid her pain. She spoke up. She said something was wrong. She screamed for help.
What she got was pills. What she got was a mat on the floor. What she got was a death sentence.
Let’s be clear: the problem isn’t one bad nurse or one overworked guard. The problem is a system that treats asylum seekers and immigrants especially (Black and brown ones) as disposable. It’s a conveyor belt of dehumanization, where every new “incident” is quietly investigated, never truly addressed, and ultimately forgotten.
Except by the people who loved them.
How Many More?
Guerline Jozef of the Haitian Bridge Alliance called Marie’s death what it was: the result of cruelty. “We demand full transparency,” she said. So do I. So should you.
Because if we don’t raise hell for Marie, we are complicit in the silence.
This isn’t about one woman. This is about all the women. All the detainees locked away out of sight, treated like cargo, stripped of rights, and abandoned when they get sick. This is about the families who will never see justice. The children who will never see their mothers again.
This is about Krome. This is about Broward. This is about ICE itself. ICE says detention is “non-punitive.” But people are dying. People are being tortured. People are begging for help—and being told to lie down and wait for death.
No more.
We are witnessing the deadliest year in ICE custody in half a decade. The Biden-era reforms are gone. Trump is back. The detentions are accelerating. The deaths are mounting. And the people with the power to stop it are doing nothing.
Follow The Money
As of 2025, the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, Florida, can hold about 700 people 595 men and 105 women. While the exact number of people held there each day isn’t shared publicly, past reports show it’s usually almost full.
Prior to the Trump Administration’s takeover, Broward appears to be one of the more humane ICE facilities on the surface. It is one of many ICE detention facilities owned and operated by The GEO Group, Inc.
As of early 2025, The GEO Group, Inc. operates approximately 16 ICE Processing Centers with a combined capacity of about 21,000 detention beds. They make approximately $110.00 USD/day per person at their facilities.
Besides running detention centers, GEO Group also tracks around 185,000 people through a program called ISAP. These are people who aren’t locked up but are waiting for their immigration court dates, and the program uses things like electronic monitoring and regular check-ins to keep track of them.
GEO Group is making huge profits off immigration detention. They’re spending $70 million to expand their services for ICE money that will only help them lock up more people.
On top of that, they’ve landed a 15-year, $1.2 billion contract to reopen Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, which will soon be the largest ICE detention center on the East Coast, with space for 1,000 people.
These aren’t just “investments” this is a business model built on suffering. GEO isn’t just meeting the growing demand for detention & they’re profiting from it and helping to expand it.
Don’t Let This Be Just Another Hashtag
Marie Ange Blaise should be alive right now. She should have been taken to a hospital. She should have been heard. Instead, she died screaming for help in a cell owned by a corporation profiting off her captivity.
We cannot let this slide into the cycle of performative outrage and forgetfulness. Let this be a turning point.
This is murder by medical neglect and evil hearts!
Thank you for writing and posting this. Private for-profit prisons are grotesquely immoral.