The mother of Karoline Leavitt’s nephew accused the Trump administration of lying about the circumstances of her arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Bruna-Caroline Ferreira, who came to the U.S. from Brazil when she was 6, overstayed a tourist visa, the Trump administration alleges—a claim Ferreira disputes.
The Trump administration also says that Ferreira has been accused of battery, another claim she denies. The 33-year-old shares custody of her middle-school-aged son with Leavitt’s 35-year-old brother, Michael.
In her first television interview about the ordeal since her release from ICE custody earlier this week, Ferreira was asked by CNN anchor Erin Burnett about the White House portraying her as an absentee parent by claiming she never lived with her son.
“Why lie?” she said. “I have so many friends and family that have called me and said, ‘Why would anyone lie about this when it’s 2025—we have a digital footprint of everything.’”
Burnett then asked if she had any words specifically for White House Press Secretary Leavitt, 28, who has publicly kept her distance from the issue.
“I think what I would have to say to Karoline is: just because you went to a Catholic school, doesn‘t make you a good Catholic‚“ Ferreira said of her son’s godmother, who went to a Catholic high school and college. ”You‘re a mother. You are a mother now, and you should know. How would you feel if you were in my shoes, you know? How would you feel if somebody did this to you?”
Ferreira was arrested by ICE while driving to pick up her son from a Boston-area school. After a flurry of stops in New Hampshire, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Texas, she was eventually brought to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, where there have been reports of sexual harassment and abuse and “neglect of urgent medical care.” She spent three weeks there before a judge on Monday allowed her to post bail.
“At the end of the day, nobody is above the law,” Ferreira continued. “It could happen to anybody… I can‘t wrap my mind around it. And hopefully there‘s a logical explanation for all of this.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast about Ferreira’s remarks.
Ferreira was joined on CNN by her lawyer, Todd Pomerlau, who said the Trump administration was subjecting his client to a costly character assassination.
“This is a woman who has two businesses, she’s a single mother who is paying her taxes, who ends up in a for-profit prison in Louisiana. It’s just unconscionable what they’re doing on a daily basis,” Pomerlau said.
“She’s in line for her green card, like tens of thousands of other people,” he explained. The “unconstitutional merry-go-round” she’s facing, Pomerlau added, is to “get illegally arrested, to then have to either hire a lawyer or hope for a volunteer, to then basically sue, to then have to pay money out of her own pocket to get out of jail, to get back to where she started.”
