Lawyer says Leavitt targeted in Trump’s DACA crackdown

Bruna Ferreira was driving to pick up her 11-year-old son from school earlier this month when she was suddenly surrounded by federal officers.

- Alex Woodward, The Independent

Karoline Leavitt

Since then, the 33-year-old Brazilian mother has been detained inside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana, hundreds of miles from her home in Massachusetts. The story of her November 12 arrest and detention is deeply familiar to hundreds of immigrant families embroiled in legal battles and deportation threats under Donald Trump's administration, but new reporting from Ferreira’s case has revealed her ties to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, whose brother is the father of Ferreira’s child.

“There's an irony here,” said Jeffrey Rubin, whose firm is representing Ferreira. “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,” he told The Independent. 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.