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A rightwing Brazilian influencer who claimed Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown targeted only “crooks” has been arrested by ICE agents in New Jersey.
Júnior Pena, whose full name is Eustáquio da Silva Pena Júnior, declared his support for the US president in a recent video message to his hundreds of thousands of social media followers.
“I [support] Donald Trump – I like the guy,” announced the South American TikToker and Instagrammer whose account purports to show “the reality of the United States” from a migrant’s perspective.
In a previous video, Pena reportedly urged Brazilians to stay calm and not “despair” after reports that ICE agents were rounding up migrants, including Brazilians. “But they’re all crooks. The lot of them,” he falsely claimed of the migrants being seized.
On Saturday, Pena was himself reportedly detained and sent to the Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark, New Jersey. One friend told the local newspaper the Brazilian Times that Pena had been taken into custody after missing a court hearing. The detainee’s lawyer, Andrew Lattarulo, was reportedly trying to resolve the situation and prevent him being transferred to another state.
The Brazilian influencer has reportedly lived in the US since 2009 and hails from Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, from where a large number of people have emigrated to the US and Europe.
Pena uses his social networks to echo the stories of migrants as well as voices critical of Brazil’s leftwing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and those supportive of its recently jailed former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who is an ally of Trump.
The US’s estimated 2 million-strong Brazilian community has been badly affected by Trump’s anti-migrant offensive, with the number of deported Brazilians hitting a record high of 2,785 last year, compared with 1,640 in 2024.
In a recent report about the “veritable manhunt” playing out under Trump, the Brazilian magazine Veja warned readers: “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 said Brazilian migrants in cities such as Boston were adopting drastic “survival tactics” including not speaking Portuguese in public and trying to dress like “average Americans” when leaving their homes.
Leftwing Brazilians flocked to Pena’s Instagram account to taunt him after news of his detention went viral. “You supported Trump and in the end you suffered the consequences,” wrote one. “What goes around comes around,” a second critic posted.
Friends of the influencer posted messages asking his followers to pray.
