A right-wing Brazilian influencer who claimed that Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown was only aimed at “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 am [support] Donald Trump – I like the guy,” announced the South American TikToker and Instagrammer whose account aims to show “the reality of the United States” from the perspective of a migrant.
In an earlier video, Pena reportedly urged Brazilians to remain calm and not “desperate” 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 caught.
On Saturday, Pena himself was reportedly detained and sent to the Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark, New Jersey. One friend told the local Brazilian newspaper Times that Pena had been taken into custody after missing a court hearing. Allegedly, the detainee’s lawyer, Andrew Lattarulo, was trying to resolve the situation and prevent him from being transferred to another state.
The Brazilian influencer has been living in the United States since 2009 and comes from Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, from where a large number of people emigrated to the United States and Europe.
Pena uses his social networks to repeat the stories of migrants as well as the critical voices of Brazil’s left-wing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and those who support his far-right ex-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 offensive against migrants, with the number of Brazilians deported hitting a record high of 2,785 last year, compared to 1,640 in 2024.
In a recent report on the “real manhunt” taking place under Trump, the Brazilian magazine Veja warned readers: “There is an atmosphere of fear in the streets where anyone who ‘looks foreign’ can be a target… regardless of their identity. [immigration] status.”
The magazine said that Brazilian migrants in cities like Boston were adopting drastic “survival tactics” including not speaking Portuguese in public and trying to dress like “average Americans” when they leave their homes.
Leftist Brazilians took to Pena’s Instagram account to mock him after news of his detention went viral. “You supported Trump and finally suffered the consequences,” wrote one. “What goes around comes around,” posted a second critic.
Friends of the influencer published messages asking his followers to pray.