Florida Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick reflects, looks ahead

Anthony Man, Tribune News Service

Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick went to Congress thanks to the slimmest possible victory, just five votes. Now, she’s secured another term without appearing on the Florida ballot at all, after no candidate came forward to challenge her reelection.

It was a last-minute surprise, and Cherfilus-McCormick will serve in the House at least until January 2027. “It feels great, and (is) a big relief,” she said. The Broward-Palm Beach County Democrat outlined her plans and priorities in a wide-ranging phone interview with The South Florida Sun Sentinel in which she also expressed puzzlement about why a celebrity threatened to run against her but never ended up backing up all his talk.

She said, more than once, that the “world is on fire,” both at home and abroad, and said Americans are yearning for solutions rather than rhetoric from their leaders. “Americans are tired of the theatre. They’re tired of being used like pawns.”

Cherfilus-McCormick, 45, narrowly won a November 2021 special primary and easily won a January 2022 special general election to succeed the late US Rep. Alcee Hastings in the 20th Congressional District, which takes in most of the Black American and Caribbean American communities in Broward and Palm Beach counties. She won a full term in 2022, and when Florida’s 2024 congressional races were set last month, she became the only representative from the state to automatically win another term when no Democrat came forward to challenge her in the August primary and Republicans didn’t put forth a candidate to run against her in November. Member of Congress is her first elected office. In the 2018 and 2020 Democratic primaries, she challenged Hastings. Although she wasn’t successful, those campaigns gave her invaluable experience and demonstrated that she wasn’t afraid to tread where seasoned politicians wouldn’t venture.

Arriving in the Capitol, she opted not to try to build name recognition with a constant presence on social media and frequent cable TV appearances. Her goal wasn’t capturing attention through viral videos. Cherfilus-McCormick attributed that approach to her background.

Before politics she went to law school and was CEO of a family-owned home health care company. “Everything’s based on performance, and ‘what have you done?’” she said. “My district is not playing with me. They go, ‘Sheila, what did you do?’ That is always the question, ‘What did you do?’ And I can’t say, ‘Hey, I was on TV!’ They’d go, ‘That’s great, but what did you do for me?’” Cherfilus-McCormick is the only Haitian American member of Congress, and her district has a large Haitian population — which makes the gang-fuelled violence and lawlessness consuming much of the Caribbean nation a vital issue to her and her constituents. She is a co-chair of the Congressional Haiti Caucus.

She said there are some promising signs with the establishment of a transitional presidential council, but lamented the slow start. “Everybody still feels like they’re in despair. Gangs are still terrorizing people.” Overall, Cherfilus-McCormick said, the efforts from the Biden administration have been positive. But when she condemned the administration’s resumption last month of deportation flights from the US to Haiti as “atrocious cruelty” and a “misguided decision.” Violence is so pervasive many people have difficulty getting food in Haiti, she said in the interview. “At some point, you know, you have to speak truth to power and the truth is, is that it’s unconscionable to do that,” Cherfilus-McCormick said. “You’re seeing people getting killed by gangs every day.” Resuming deportations in such circumstances is “just inhumane, and it had to be stated.”

In the days after an Okaloosa County sheriff’s deputy shot and killed Senior Airman Roger Fortson in still-murky circumstances on May 3, Cherfilus-McCormick said in a statement that “we must do better to prevent such senseless tragedies from happening. Law enforcement officers have a duty to protect and serve all members of our community.”

As one of only four Black members of Congress from Florida — out of a 28-person delegation — Cherfilus-McCormick said she had “an obligation” to speak out about the killing of the Black Air Force service member. “The Black community always feels like we’re being attacked,” she said in the interview. “With the killing of the airman, that brought up again the social justice issues that really haven’t been solved for us.

“There’s still real people, real lives being lost. There’s still reconstruction and reimagining that needs to go into our law enforcement to make sure that these things aren’t happening. There’s still people who are crying every day because there’s things like this going on,” Cherfilus-McCormick said. “Watching that video just broke my heart because even after they shot him and you saw the video, they’re still asking him to move his arms or commanding him to do this and you shot him. He’s dying. He can’t breathe.