ICE Detainee Bruna Ferreira, Mom of Karoline Leavitt’s Nephew, Says She ‘Made a Mistake’ in ‘Trusting’ Trump’s White House Secretary

(Evan Vucci/AP photo/WCVB)

Bruna Ferreira, the mother of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s nephew, said she “made a mistake” by “trusting” her in-laws after she was arrested by ICE and cast by the administration as a “criminal” and absent parent.

Ferreira was arrested on November 12 by ICE and faces deportation to Brazil, after overstaying a visa from when she was a child in 1998. Her arrest was captured on video as multiple unmarked SUVs surrounded her car.

She shares an 11-year-old son with Michael Leavitt, the press secretary’s brother, and claimed in an exclusive video interview with the Washington Post from a detention center in Louisiana on Sunday that at one point she even asked Karoline Leavitt to be her son’s godmother.

“I asked Karoline to be godmother over my only sister,” she said Thursday. “I made a mistake there, in trusting.

Ferreira rounded on the White House’s response to her connection to the press secretary: “Why they’re creating this narrative is beyond my wildest imagination.”

The White House insists Ferreira was neither close to the family nor involved in her son’s upbringing. Officials distributed a Department of Homeland Security statement describing her as a “criminal”.

Ferreira called the characterization “insulting” and “disgusting,” adding that Leavitt’s defense of anti-immigration raids sits uneasily with the family reality she says she knows.

According to the newspaper, however, court filings, family photographs, and her own account suggest a far more entangled relationship.

For nearly a decade, Ferreira and Michael Leavitt reportedly shared caregiving responsibilities. The pair met at a nightclub and had their son before breaking up in 2015. Despite having reportedly threatened to have her deported, Michael Leavitt told the Washington Post he had no role in her arrest.

“I have no control over that and had no involvement in that whatsoever,” he said.

Ferreira contested the claim she was not a present parent in her son’s life and argued that as recently as this spring she approved her son’s visit to the White House Easter egg roll and said she “moved mountains” to make sure he could be at Leavitt’s wedding in January.

Her concern, she said, remains primarily for her son, and she fears the prospect of never seeing him again.

“He needs me now,” she said of her son. “He doesn’t need me in 20 years.”