Trump-loving influencer grabbed by ICE after claiming only 'crooks' being deported
A right-wing Brazilian influencer who defended President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown has been scooped up by federal agents.
Júnior Pena recently declared his support for Trump and his immigration policies in a video directed to his hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, falsely claiming that the administration was rounding up only criminal migrants, reported The Guardian.
“I [support] Donald Trump – I like the guy,” the TikTok and Instagram influencer said, adding that most immigrants need not be worried because federal officers were only arresting criminals. "They’re all crooks, the lot of them."
Pena was reportedly picked up and detained Saturday and sent to the Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark, according to the Portuguese-language newspaper the Brazilian Times.
His lawyer Andrew Lattarulo was reportedly trying to prevent Pena from being transferred to another state, the paper reported.
The influencer, whose full name is Eustáquio da Silva Pena Júnior, has reportedly lived in the U.S. since 2009 and uses his social media networks to criticize Brazil’s leftwing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and amplify supporters of the country's recently jailed former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who is a Trump ally.
A record-high 2,785 Brazilians were deported in Trump's first year back in office, compared to 1,640 in 2024, and many Brazilians have adopted “survival tactics," such as not speaking Portuguese in public and trying to pass themselves off as “average Americans," according to the Brazilian magazine Veja.
“There is an atmosphere of fear on the streets where anyone who ‘looks foreign’ can be a target … irrespective of their [immigration] status," the magazine reported.