Carolyn Leavitt’s detained relative burned her out of ICE custody

The mother of White House press secretary Carolyn Levitt’s nephew has come out from inside ICE custody, blasting Levitt for her “disgusting” attempt to paint him as her absentee parent.

Bruna Ferreira, 33, a Brazilian citizen who was detained by ICE agents in Revere, Massachusetts last month, said in an interview with The Washington Post on Sunday that Leavitt, 28, was once “like a little sister to her.”

“I made a mistake there, believing,” said Ferreira, who is being held at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile.

Ferreira, who came to the U.S. at age 6, was picked up by ICE agents on her way to pick up her 11-year-old son from school, her attorney told The Daily Beast. Since then, the White House has tried to distance Levitt’s New Hampshire family from him, with insiders repeatedly claiming that Levitt hasn’t spoken to his nephew’s mother in “years.”

But in the weeks before his arrest, Ferreira was cheering on her son at a recreational soccer game with Caroline’s parents and brother, she said.

“I asked Caroline to be my only sister’s godmother,” she told the Post. “Why they are creating this story is beyond my wildest imagination.”

Levitt has served as the face of former President Donald Trump’s sweeping mass-deportation agenda — but her once-close relationship with Ferreira complicates the staunchly anti-immigration persona she projects in public.

White House officials have taken aggressive steps to distance Levitt from Ferreira, even falsely claiming that the Department of Homeland Security called Ferreira a “felon” with a prior arrest for “battery.”

His attorney, Todd Pomerleau, has dismissed those claims as lies. No publicly available court records show Ferreira was ever arrested.

Levitt’s brother, Michael—Ferreira’s ex-fiancé—also alleges that she never lived with her son, even as she claimed in New Hampshire court records in 2015.

Pomerleau said the Levitts knew Ferreira was in the process of getting a green card that would grant her permanent U.S. residency. Ferreira has lived in the country since she was 6 years old and was granted protection under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era program that protects certain immigrants from deportation.

The lawyer claims his client was targeted, and Michael previously accused Ferreira of threatening him with deportation after their 2015 split.

In his custody, Michael and Caroline’s father, Bob Levitt, has urged Ferreira to “self-deport” and try to return legally — a “trap,” Pomerleau said, as federal law prevents him from re-entering the U.S. for ten years.

On Wednesday, a chilling video surfaced showing Ferreira being taken into ICE custody last month. The 90-second clip shows her driving a sedan in a parking lot while at least five unmarked vehicles boxed in tinted windows—a trick Pomerleau claims.

As Ferreira rifled through her purse for her license, her attorney said an agent asked, “Are you Bruna?” Without producing a warrant, the masked agents ordered him out of the car, pushed him into the vehicle, and within seconds handcuffed him. Another agent then got into his car and drove away.

Ferreira said Michael and Bob were among the few people who knew her schedule and whereabouts, the Post reported.

“My son is waiting in the school bus pickup line and there’s no one to pick him up,” she said, wiping away tears. “It’s very unfortunate that things have turned out this way.”

The Daily Beast has reached out to Michael for comment. In a statement to the Post last week, he said: “I had nothing to do with him picking up the ice. I had no control over it and I had nothing to do with it.”

Michael has a criminal history of his own, court records show. In 2009, at 19, he was found guilty of drunk driving and fined $620. Two years later, he was arrested for disorderly conduct in Miami, though the charges were dropped, the Post reported.

The Daily Beast has reached out to ICE and the White House for comment.