The woman who says she was deported as a favor to a friend of Donald Trump and Melania is speaking out about her hellish experience in ICE custody.
Amanda Ungaro, a Brazilian model, says she was detained at the request of Paolo Zampolli, an Italian modeling agent whose decadeslong relationship with the president and first lady helped land him a role as Trump’s special envoy. Zampolli, 56, is locked in a bitter custody battle with Ungaro, 41, over their 16-year-old son.
“It was not enough for him to destroy me during 20 years of relationship: he wanted to destroy me again when I started a new life, when I got married,” Ungaro told the Spanish newspaper El País during an interview in her Rio de Janeiro penthouse.
Ungaro, who at 17 was recruited to the U.S. by infamous sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein—Trump’s former friend and a known associate of Zampolli’s—served alongside her former partner as an ambassador to the United Nations during Trump’s first term, representing Grenada and Dominica. But after the couple separated and she left Washington for Florida, where she lived with her current husband, things took a turn for the worse.
In June, Ungaro alleged that ten police officers “stormed” the home she shared with her husband, a Brazilian doctor. The couple was arrested and charged with fraud tied to a cosmetic clinic after an anonymous tip, she said. Ungaro, who has no prior criminal record, told the outlet she was placed in a cell with “child murderers.”
Zampolli then allegedly wielded his influence as a member of Trump’s orbit, reportedly reaching out to top officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement to ask whether Ungaro could be transferred into ICE custody, according to reporting from the New York Times. Ungaro claims her former partner used her immigration status as a means of control, and that she cycled through temporary visas—her most recent expiring in 2019.
The model, who dined with the Trumps at Mar-a-Lago in the president’s first administration and spent New Year’s with them in 2022, said she was then handcuffed and transferred to an immigration detention center in Miami, where she spent “the whole day crying,” she told El País.
Inside, Ungaro described disturbing scenes, including an octogenarian handcuffed to a wheelchair and a woman who miscarried and was forced to wait an agonizingly long time for medical care. There were also, she said, numerous detainees with residency permits—and a legal right to live in the United States.
After three and a half months, Ungaro said she was transferred to Louisiana before being deported back to Brazil. “It was a hall with more than 120 people, the floor was wet, there were no windows, four days without seeing the sun… I came out infested with lice,” she told the Spanish media outlet.
When she finally returned to Brazil, which she had left at 13 to pursue modeling, Ungaro said she had nothing—except the prison uniform on her back.
For his part, Zampolli has denied involvement in Ungaro’s detention. DHS has also denied any interference from Zampolli.
“My relationship with the biological mother of my son was very difficult. I stick around for my son because in Italy, normally you have a father and a mother,” the Italian modeling agent told the Daily Beast.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Ungaro for comment.
Like Trump, Zampolli was a fixture of New York City nightlife throughout the ’90s and was the modeling agent who discovered Melania Knauss, later introducing her to Trump. The special envoy, who also sits on the Kennedy Board of Trustees, is credited with helping secure Melania’s H-1B visa.
Zampolli also doubled down on Melania’s statement on Thursday, in which the first lady rejected suggestions that Epstein introduced her to Trump.
“I said: ‘Melania meet Donald, Donald meet Melania,’ and then I left the table because I had 300 guests,” he told the Daily Beast.
A spokesperson for Melania Trump has previously told the Daily Beast that the first lady “has no knowledge of, nor involvement in, the personal affairs of Mr. Zampoli and Ms. Ungaro,” and that she has no contact with ICE.
Zampolli has also been named several times in the millions of Epstein-related documents released by the Justice Department, though he has never been accused of criminal wrongdoing in connection to the late sex offender, who died by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019.
“For me, Jeffrey Epstein was a financial partner of Victoria’s Secret. I had to deal with him. We never get along, thank God,” he told the Daily Beast. “But I had to have a very cordial relationship.”
This isn’t the first time a member of the president’s inner circle has faced accusations of using his deportation crackdown for personal gain. In November, the mother of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s nephew was detained without warning while on her way to pick up her son from school—a move her lawyer alleged was “targeted.”
