From Minneapolis to Broward: When Immigration Enforcement Stops Being Abstract

By Attiyya Atkins

Broward County is home to more than 2 million residents, and the majority are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Immigration policy is not distant here. It shapes the lives of our neighbors every day.

Protests over immigration enforcement in Minneapolis have pushed ICE back into the national spotlight. Crowds gather, chants rise, and cable news panels debate policy and politics.

But something else is happening, too — something that has always marked turning points in American history. People are uniting across lines of race, background, and politics when they believe something is deeply wrong. As a nation, we are often divided in our opinions. But when Americans sense injustice, there is a reflex toward collective response. It is one of the country’s better instincts.

I saw a smaller version of that unity in Chicago in June 2025. Demonstrations gathered downtown, near major hotels, because word had spread that ICE had been targeting housekeepers and hotel workers — people widely viewed not as threats, but as the backbone of the service economy. The crowds weren’t massive, but they were intentional. People showed up because they believed working people deserved dignity, not fear.

Six months later, seeing more than 50,000 people mobilize in Minneapolis reflects something bigger. It’s the same city that, nearly six years ago, became the epicenter of global protest after the murder of George Floyd — a moment that reshaped conversations about justice far beyond policing. Minneapolis has become, again, a place where local events echo nationally.

But in Broward County, this conversation isn’t symbolic. It has a face.

Marie Ange Blaise.

The 44-year-old Haitian woman died on April 25 while in federal immigration custody at the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach. Her cause of death remains under investigation. She had been detained after a stop in St. Croix and transferred through multiple facilities before arriving in South Florida. Her journey ended in a detention center located in a majority-Black, Caribbean community — the kind of neighborhood where her story feels painfully close to home.

When demonstrators in Minneapolis protest immigration enforcement, they are responding to a system. Here in Broward, we are responding to a loss.

Following Blaise’s death last year, Congresswoman Frederica Wilson and Congresswoman Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick toured the facility. Their assessment was direct and deeply critical.

“Leaving the Broward Transitional Center, I have no faith in the leadership of the facility or ICE,” Wilson said. “They don’t even view the immigrants detained in there as humans… We are an immigrant-rich society, especially in South Florida.”

“One single doctor to care for hundreds of detainees — with some being forced to sleep on the floor — is inhumane. Marie Blaise’s tragic death will not be a one-off if these cruel conditions persist,” Cherfilus-McCormick said.

ICE maintains that detainees receive comprehensive care and that transparency procedures are being followed. Yet the gap between official assurances and oversight accounts is exactly what fuels protests — in Minneapolis, Chicago, and beyond.

This is where the issue moves beyond politics.

No one disputes that immigration laws exist. But enforcement methods are choices. Facilities described by critics as “Alligator Alcatraz,” isolated and heavily securitized, signal deterrence through fear. For immigrant communities, especially Haitians fleeing crisis, that fear feels less like policy and more like punishment.

America’s history offers perspective. Groups once labeled dangerous — Chinese immigrants, Japanese Americans, Irish and Italian newcomers — later became part of the nation’s fabric. Harsh policies were defended at the time. Regret followed later.

The pattern is uncomfortable: harm often arrives convinced it is doing good.

But history also shows something else: Americans tend to gather when they believe the line between law and humanity has been crossed. That unity — seen in Chicago, in Minneapolis, and in communities quietly speaking up elsewhere — is not about rejecting laws. It is about insisting that laws do not erase basic human worth.

Villij News does not claim to hold the solution to immigration reform. But we know this: when enforcement becomes inhumane, when detention strips people of dignity, and when death becomes part of the system’s footprint, something is broken.

From Minneapolis streets to Broward detention centers, the message people are sending is not complicated. Law and humanity cannot be separated. Security without dignity erodes both.

In a county where immigrants are the majority, this is not someone else’s debate.

It is ours.

And once someone dies in custody, the argument is no longer theoretical.

It is human.