The brother of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt raged against The Washington Post after a new report detailed his close relationship with the mother of his child, a Brazilian immigrant arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last month.
Michael Leavitt had a child with Bruna Ferreira in 2014 after the pair met in a nightclub. The couple was even engaged for a period. Ferreira, 33, was arrested by ICE on November 12 and accused of being in the U.S. illegally after overstaying a visa from when she was a child.
Since her arrest, the White House has portrayed Ferreira as an absent mother who was not involved in Michael Leavitt’s or their son’s lives. However, court records and family photos obtained by The Post paint a different picture.
“[The Washington Post is] trying to use this whole situation to push a narrative to smear me,” Michael wrote to The Post in a text message.
The White House has also attempted to distance Karoline Leavitt from Ferreira, who says she once considered the press secretary a younger sister.
“I asked Karoline to be godmother over my only sister,” Ferreira told the newspaper. “I made a mistake there, in trusting…. Why they’re creating this narrative is beyond my wildest imagination.”
Ferreira came to the U.S. from Brazil in 1998, when she was six, and received protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, the Obama-era program that has shielded tens of thousands of people who entered the country as children without legal status.
She says the disparaging comments from the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, which called her a “criminal” in a statement, were offensive. Her arrest last month comes as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
While Ferreira and Michael Leavitt were engaged to be married, their relationship turned sour, and they broke up in 2015, according to the report.
With her connection to the Leavitts, Ferreira’s arrest has drawn nationwide attention and spurred questions about whether she had been targeted.
Ferreira said the White House’s claims that she never lived with her child are “disgusting” and false. She described her duties as a doting mother, bringing her son, now 11, to school and his sports games.
Michael Leavitt, 35, echoed those allegations. However, in court records filed in 2015, he wrote that they shared a home and listed them at the same address.
Ferreira’s legal status had long been a point of contention in her relationship with Michael Leavitt, according to the report. After they broke up, she noted in court records that he had previously threatened to try to get her deported.
In text messages to The Post, Michael Leavitt denied involvement in her arrest.
“I had no involvement in her being picked up by ice,” he said. “I have no control over that and had no involvement in that whatsoever.”
Meanwhile, Ferreira said that Michael Leavitt and his father, Bob Leavitt, have recently tried to convince her to “self-deport” and try to return legally.
Her lawyer, Todd Pomerleau, said she has no criminal record. If she were to “self-deport,” she would be barred from coming back to the U.S. for a decade, according to the report.
The report also detailed the pair’s messy split and custody battle over their son. In court, both Ferreira and Michael Leavitt accused each other of abuse and neglect. Leavitt sought primary custody of their son, claiming Ferreira had pushed him during an argument.
She denied those claims in court filings and accused Michael of abuse, saying that on the day of her baby shower, he had drunkenly pushed her, punched walls, and broken doors. Over the past decade, several judges have ordered the couple to share custody and resolve their differences outside of court, according to the report.
In 2021, the couple agreed that their son would live with his father during the week while attending school in New Hampshire, while his mother would visit and take him home with her on the weekends, according to court records.
Ferreira also had permission to take him to Brazil to secure his dual citizenship, according to the report.
In a text message to The Post, Leavitt said he wants Ferreira to be able to see their son.
“I want my son to have a relationship with his mother as I always have shown that,” he said. Lawyers for Ferreira say that it would be difficult if she were removed from the country.
The day Ferreira was arrested in Revere, Massachusetts, she had been heading out to pick up her son from school, she told the newspaper.
“The thought of my son waiting for me at the school car pickup line and having no one to be there to pick him up is the thing that I keep replaying in my head,” she said. “It’s just very unfortunate that this is the way that things have transpired.”
A DHS spokesperson previously said that Ferreira is being held at an ICE Processing Center in South Louisiana.
Following her arrest, attorney Jeffrey Rubin, who represents Ferreira, noted the irony of the situation in a statement to The Independent.
“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 said.