The Brazilian mother of Karoline Leavitt’s nephew thanked her supporters in her first statements since her release from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, where she has been locked up for nearly a month and threatened with removal from the country.
In a pair of Instagram posts, Bruna Ferreira said she will answer everyone “as soon as humanly possible.”
“Thank you to everyone who was in my corner,” Ferreira wrote Tuesday above a photograph of her with her son and three kittens.
“I’ll be personally calling and texting each and every single one of you individually as soon as I land!” she added.
An immigration judge in Louisiana ordered her release on bond Monday more than three weeks after she was arrested while driving to pick up her 11-year-old son from school. Since then, the 33-year-old mother has been detained inside an ICE facility in Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles from her home in Massachusetts, in a case that has thrown the family of a key official in Donald Trump’s administration into the president’s mass deportation campaign.
The judge set a $1,500 bond while she continues a legal battle against the administration, which continues to label her a “criminal illegal alien” in public statements about the case.
Immigration Judge Cynthia Goodman ordered her release on the lowest-dollar bond possible, according to attorney Todd Pomerleau, who told The Independent that government lawyers “never once argued” in court that she was a “criminal illegal alien” and waived appeal.
Following her bond order, a spokesperson for Homeland Security once again labeled Ferreira a “criminal illegal alien.” Ferreira will have “periodic mandatory check-ins with ICE law enforcement to ensure she is abiding by the terms of her release,” the spokesperson told The Independent.
“The Department of Homeland Security will continue to work to remove all aliens illegally present in the country as quickly as possible,” the spokesperson added.
The story of Ferreira’s arrest is deeply familiar to hundreds of immigrant families embroiled in similar legal battles and deportation threats, but the revelation of her ties to the White House press secretary, whose brother is the father of Ferreira’s child, has complicated the administration’s anti-immigration agenda.
“She’s somebody that has generated publicity because of her relationship to somebody who is part of the inner circle of the White House, but at the end of the day, that she’s just one of many thousands and thousands of people that are getting this treatment on a daily basis in this administration,” Jeffrey Rubin, whose firm is representing Ferreira, told The Independent last month.
Ferreira’s parents emigrated from Brazil and brought their young daughter with them in 1998 when she was roughly 6 years old. Her two younger siblings were born in the United States.
She received temporary legal protections under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the Obama-era program that has shielded tens of thousands of people who arrived in the country as children without legal status, and she was in the process of obtaining a green card, according to her legal team.
She was previously engaged to Michael Leavitt, Karoline’s brother, and they share custody of their son. They broke up more than 10 years ago.
In a recent interview with The Washington Post while she was still in custody, Ferreira said she wanted Leavitt to be her son’s godmother.
“I made a mistake there, in trusting,” she said. “Why they’re creating this narrative is beyond my wildest imagination.”
Ferreira, who lives in Massachusetts, does not appear to have had any criminal convictions. She was arrested for being in the United States without legal permission after overstaying a visa that expired when she was a child, according to her attorneys.
After her arrest, the White House claimed Ferreira had not spoken to Leavitt in years and that Ferreira had never lived with her son. Homeland Security also accused her of being arrested for “battery,” which her legal team has not been able to corroborate.
The Independent has requested comment from the White House.
Her arrest is among many in a “random and cruel mass deportation campaign” under the Trump administration’s anti-immigration agenda, according to Rubin.
“It’s outrageous and abhorrent, and the rhetoric alone is disgusting,” he told The Independent last month.
