A former college team captain says she was steps from her gate when agents stopped her. What followed, she says, left her feeling less than human — and split a congresswoman's assessment of two different facilities right down the middle.
Stopped Short of the Gate
Claudia Carolina Rodríguez Caglianone had already made it through TSA screening at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on July 17 and was walking toward her gate, planning to meet friends in North Carolina for a World Cup watch party, when two immigration officers stepped in front of her. She told WSVN she was initially told she'd only be asked a few questions before heading home. That didn't happen. ICE later described the stop to the South Florida Sun Sentinel as a targeted operation rather than a chance encounter. Rodríguez, known to friends and family as "CC," put it more bluntly to Local10: "They handcuffed me like a criminal."
The 28-year-old arrived from Venezuela on a tourist visa in January 2017 and applied for asylum within six months — a case still working its way through immigration court nearly a decade later, according to Diario Las Américas. She also held Temporary Protected Status starting in 2023, coverage that disappeared last year when the Trump administration wound down TPS for Venezuelan nationals. Her family says she has no criminal record.
Eight Days at a Facility Built for Hours, Not Weeks
Agents first took Rodríguez to ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations office in Miramar — a site designed to process people within roughly 12 hours, with an administrative waiver stretching that to 72 in a pinch, according to Local10. She stayed eight days. Rodríguez says she shared a single room with roughly 47 other women, nearly all of them sleeping on a bare floor with no bedding. Food arrived expired or spotted with mold, she said, and detainees asking for water were pointed toward a bathroom sink instead. (Separately, advocates who rallied outside the same Miramar office in early July described detainees sleeping on concrete floors under similar overcrowding — a detail Rodríguez herself didn't specify but that lines up with her account of the room.)
It's that stretch that produced the line now attached to her story. "I feel like I was an animal in a zoo on the floor, dirty," she told CBS Miami. Rodríguez also told Local10 she watched other detainees go without adequate care — among them an elderly woman with diabetes and knee problems whose medication wasn't readily available, plus pregnant women and someone being treated for breast cancer. Her family says the ordeal cost her roughly 15 pounds.
One Congresswoman, Two Very Different Verdicts
U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, began pushing ICE for Rodríguez's release once the case became public, eventually making an unannounced stop at the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, where Rodríguez had by then been moved. Staff wouldn't let the two meet face-to-face, but arranged a phone call that ran nearly 15 minutes, according to CBS Miami.
Here's where the story splits in two. Touring the Broward facility itself, Wasserman Schultz came away describing the physical conditions as clean and orderly — she'd expected worse and found working recreational space and library access instead. But she drew a hard line between the building and the policy putting people in it, telling reporters outside that roughly 671 people held there had no serious criminal history and calling their detention, in remarks carried by WLRN, "outrageous and unacceptable." In other words: her complaint wasn't that Broward was squalid — it wasn't, by her account — it was that the people inside it shouldn't have been there at all. That distinction matters, because it was Miramar, not Broward, where the worst conditions were reported.
Rodríguez's cousin, Gabriel Dominguez, described the toll on the family, including a 94-year-old grandmother struggling to understand the arrest. "It's heartbreaking," he told WUSF. Supporters organized online under a "Free CC" campaign that spread through South Florida's Venezuelan community.
Bond, Release, and a Fear That Hasn't Lifted
An immigration judge granted Rodríguez bond on Aug. 3, and she left Broward that same afternoon wearing an ankle monitor. Conditions there had been an improvement over Miramar, she said, though detainees needing medical attention still sometimes waited close to a full day to be seen. Freedom hasn't fully settled her nerves. "I do not feel safe," she told WLRN, pointing to accounts of other released detainees being taken back into custody.
Before her detention, Rodríguez played defense and eventually captained the women's soccer team at St. Thomas University in Miami Gardens, finishing her bachelor's degree and, in 2025, an MBA at the same school, according to NBC6 Miami. She's said she intends to keep fighting her asylum case from inside the U.S. rather than leave. NBC6 also notes a legal wrinkle central to why advocates consider her arrest questionable: immigration attorneys generally agree a pending asylum application should shield someone from removal while the case remains open.
ICE Isn't Backing Down
The agency hasn't shifted its position. A spokesperson told the Sun Sentinel that Rodríguez's visa lapsed in July 2017 and that neither her pending asylum case nor any past work authorization changed that. "In violation of our nation's laws, she overstayed her visa. Work authorization or a pending application does NOT confer legal status in the United States," the spokesperson told the Sun Sentinel, adding that it was a judge, not ICE, who ultimately ordered her release.
Rodríguez's detention landed amid a sharp jump in South Florida immigration enforcement. ICE agents made 5,605 arrests in the Miami area between July 1 and July 26 alone, the agency told Diario Las Américas — a surge tied in part to the expiration of TPS protections for thousands of Venezuelans. Wasserman Schultz says she expects more cases like this one. "Stories like Claudia's and so many others must lead to action," she said, in a statement carried by The Floridian.
