The mother of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s nephew has come out swinging from inside ICE custody, blasting Leavitt for her “disgusting” attempts to paint her as an absentee parent.
Brazilian national Bruna Ferreira, 33, who was detained by ICE agents in Revere, Massachusetts, last month, said in an interview with The Washington Post on Sunday that Leavitt, 28, was once “like a younger sister to her.”
“I made a mistake there, in trusting,” said Ferreira, who is being held at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile.
Ferreira, who came to the U.S. at age 6, was picked up by ICE agents while en route to pick up her 11-year-old son from school, her attorney told the Daily Beast. Since then, the White House has scrambled to distance Leavitt’s New Hampshire family from her, with insiders repeatedly claiming Leavitt hasn’t spoken to her nephew’s mother in “years.”
But just weeks before her arrest, Ferreira was cheering on her son at a recreational football game alongside Karoline’s parents and brother, she said.
“I asked Karoline to be godmother over my only sister,” she told the Post. “Why they’re creating this narrative is beyond my wildest imagination.”
Leavitt has served as the face of former President Donald Trump’s sweeping mass-deportation agenda—but her once-close relationship with Ferreira complicates the hardened anti-immigration persona she projects publicly.
White House officials have taken aggressive steps to distance Leavitt from Ferreira, even amplifying a Department of Homeland Security statement falsely claiming Ferreira was a “criminal” with a prior arrest for “battery.”
Her attorney, Todd Pomerleau, has dismissed those claims as lies. No publicly available court records show Ferreira has ever been arrested.
Leavitt’s brother, Michael—Ferreira’s ex-fiancé—has also alleged she never lived with her son, though he himself filed New Hampshire court records in 2015 listing them at the same address.
Pomerleau said the Leavitts were aware Ferreira was in the process of obtaining a green card that would grant her permanent U.S. residency. Ferreira has lived in the country since age six and was granted protection under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Obama-era program shielding certain immigrants from deportation.
The attorney claimed his client was targeted, and alleged that Michael previously threatened Ferreira with deportation following their 2015 split.
Since her detention, Michael and Karoline’s father, Bob Leavitt, has urged Ferreira to “self deport” and attempt to return legally—a “trap,” Pomerleau said, that under federal law would bar her from reentering the U.S. for ten years.
On Wednesday, a chilling video surfaced showing Ferreira being taken into ICE custody last month. The 90-second clip shows her driving a sedan through a parking lot when at least five unmarked vehicles with tinted windows box her in—a maneuver Pomerleau insists was targeted.
As Ferreira rifled through her purse for her license, her attorney said that one agent asked, “Are you Bruna?” With no warrant presented, masked agents then ordered her out of the car, shoved her against a vehicle, and handcuffed her within seconds. Another agent then climbed into her car and drove it away.
Ferreira said Michael and Bob were among the few people who knew her schedule and address, the Post reported.
“The thought of my son waiting for me at the school car pickup line and having no one to be there to pick him up is the thing that I keep replaying in my head,” she said, wiping away tears. “It’s just very unfortunate that this is the way that things have transpired.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Michael for comment. In a statement to the Post last week, he said: “I had no involvement in her being picked up by ice. I have no control over that and had no involvement in that whatsoever.”
Michael has his own criminal history, court records show. In 2009, at 19, he was found guilty of drunken driving and fined $620. Two years later, he was arrested for disorderly conduct in Miami, though the charges were dropped, the Post reported.
The Daily Beast has reached out to ICE and the White House for comment.
