Mother of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s nephew ordered released from immigration detention
Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, during a news conference in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, Dec. 1, 2025. Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — The mother of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s nephew was ordered released from immigration detention on Monday, according to her attorney.
Bruna Caroline Ferreira, who is in the process of obtaining a green card and previously held DACA status, was ordered released by an immigration judge on a minimum bond of $1,500.
Ferreira’s attorney, Todd Pomerleau, told ABC News that he argued at a hearing that his client is not a “criminal illegal alien,” as described by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), nor that she is a flight risk.
Ferreira is expected to be released Monday or Tuesday, according to Pomerleau.
The White House did not immediately respond to an ABC News request for comment.
DHS confirmed two weeks ago that Ferreira had been detained. A reporter with ABC New Hampshire station WMUR spoke with Leavitt’s brother, Michael Leavitt, who also confirmed the arrest and said Ferreira had been detained a few weeks previously.
A DHS spokesperson then described Ferreira, a Brazilian national, as a “criminal illegal alien” who had a previous arrest for battery and had overstayed a visa that expired in 1999.
“ICE arrested Bruna Caroline Ferreria, a criminal illegal alien from Brazil. She has a previous arrest for battery. She entered the U.S. on a B2 tourist visa that required her to depart the U.S. by June 6, 1999,” the DHS spokesperson said. “She is currently at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center and is in removal proceedings. Under President Trump and Secretary Noem, all individuals unlawfully present in the United States are subject to deportation,” the spokesperson said.
“Bruna has no criminal record whatsoever, I don’t know where that is coming from. Show us the proof,” Pomerleau told Boston ABC station WCVB after Ferreria’s arrest was announced.
Pomerleau also said then that Ferreira entered the country lawfully, previously held DACA status and was in the process of obtaining a green card. He further said that his client was arrested in her car in Massachusetts after being stopped with no warrant, adding that he now has to litigate her case in Louisiana, thousands of miles away from her home.
Pomerleau also told WCVB that he did not believe that his client’s connection to Karoline Leavitt could affect the case, adding that he believes it’s just “happenstance.”
ABC News’ Armando Garcia, Jason Volack and Hannah Demissie contributed to this story.
(RALEIGH, N.C.) — North Carolina’s GOP statehouse leaders say the legislature will meet next week to consider redrawing the state’s congressional districts, saying they want to bolster President Donald Trump as the White House continues to encourage Republicans to redistrict mid-decade ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
“President Trump earned a clear mandate from the voters of North Carolina and the rest of the country, and we intend to defend it by drawing an additional Republican Congressional seat,” state Rep. Destin Hall, the speaker of the North Carolina House, wrote in a blog post on Monday.
The Republican-controlled legislature was already scheduled to meet next week. Although North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein is a Democrat, the state’s constitution doesn’t allow him to veto redistricted legislative or congressional maps.
North Carolina’s congressional map is currently being litigated in multiple ongoing lawsuits, according to a roundup from NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, over allegations the map racially discriminates and is a partisan gerrymander.
Currently, 10 Republicans and four Democrats make up North Carolina’s congressional delegation.
Sen. Phil Berger, the Senate majority leader, wrote Monday, “Picking up where Texas left off, we will hold votes in our October session to redraw North Carolina’s congressional map to ensure Gavin Newsom doesn’t decide the congressional majority,” referencing the the California governor’s Proposition 50 special election, when voters will decide if they want to adopt a map that could help Democrats flip five seats.
House Redistricting Chairmen Brenden Jones and Hugh Blackwell said in a joint statement: “We’re stepping into this redistricting battle because California and the radical left are attempting to rig the system to handpick who runs Congress. This ploy is nothing new, and North Carolina will not stand by while they attempt to stack the deck. President Trump has called on us to fight back, and North Carolina stands ready to level the playing field.”
In response, North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton called state Republican leaders subservient to Trump and guilty of corruption.
“North Carolina Republicans Phil Berger and Destin Hall are weak subservient cowards willing to steamroll the people of our state so they can give Donald Trump what he wants — power without accountability. Today, [North Carolina General Assembly] Republicans announced they will be tearing up our already brutally gerrymandered congressional maps and redrawing them to give more seats to Congressional Republicans. Let me be clear: maps should not give you power; voters should. When politicians pick their voters instead of voters picking their politicians, that’s not democracy. That’s corruption,” Clayton said in a statement to ABC News.
Stein responded on Monday to the GOP statehouse leaders’ announcement by slamming them for failing voters and calling out how the state legislature has yet to pass a budget.
“The General Assembly works for North Carolina, not Donald Trump,” Stein wrote.
“The Republican leadership in the General Assembly has failed to pass a budget, failed to pay our teachers and law enforcement what they deserve, and failed to fully fund Medicaid. Now they are failing you, the voters. These shameless politicians are abusing their power to take away yours.”
North Carolina Democrats are planning an anti-redistricting rally on Oct. 21 in Raleigh.
(NEW YORK) — President Donald Trump’s executive order strapping a six-figure fee to the H1-B visa has created confusion for tech firms and the tens of thousands of foreign employees that the companies have depended on for their growth, according to immigration and business experts.
Trump and his officials touted the recent order to add a $100,000 fee for every H1-B application as one that would help create more job opportunities for Americans. This visa program allows U.S. employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations.
However, the president’s move will make it difficult for tech firms to expand U.S. operations or incentivize highly talented foreign workers to choose America as the place they launch their next big idea, Stuart Anderson, the executive director of non-partisan think tank National Foundation for American Policy, told ABC News.
“More than half of the billion-dollar start-ups have at least one immigrant co-founder,” Anderson said. “And those firms lead to thousands of jobs for Americans.”
Anderson, who served as the executive associate commissioner at the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service under President George W. Bush, acknowledged that the H1-B program was in need of reform, particularly when it came to mega corporations dominating the visa’s lottery system. However, he said the current administration’s approach does more harm to the program than good.
He and other analysts noted that even if the $100,000 fee is reversed, some damage to the tech economy may have already been done as entrepreneurs and prospective employees rethink their options.
“If you cut off highly skilled people from coming into the country, you’re going to cut off chances of having a dominant economy,” Anderson said.
How H1-B works The H1-B visa program was created as part of the 1990 immigration bill and allowed foreign prospective employees with college and graduate degrees in select fields such as computer sciences, engineering and medical research to legally live and work in America.
The law allows for 65,000 H1-B visas a year, which lasts for three to six years, for applicants with bachelor’s degrees and an additional 20,000 a year for workers with higher-level degrees. Academic institutions are exempt from this cap.
Applicants can renew their visa when it expires with the approval of their employer.
A study released in March by Pew Research found that there were roughly 400,000 applications for the H1-B visa, the majority of which were for renewals.
In addition to paying for the visa’s fees, which are around $5,000 for filing costs, companies must follow strict rules in order for the visa to be approved, according to Greg Morrisett, the dean and vice provost of Cornell Tech.
“A company that files for an H1 has to provide an assertion that they hire for the same salaries as it does for an American citizen,” he said.
Morrisett said that many tech firms — such as Microsoft, Facebook and Google –have benefited from the program by hiring engineers and programmers from places like India, China and South Korea. He noted that these workers played essential roles in developing their products and successes.
Several major tech CEOs — including Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Google’s Sundar Pichai — are foreign-born and were on H1-B visas after they finished their college and graduate studies in America.
“I think the U.S has led in technology and engineering because of the federal government’s investments and universities attracted the best minds and gave them the ability to thrive,” Morrisett said.
Despite its success, the program has come under criticism from conservative groups who argue that it takes jobs away from American-born workers.
Other critics argue that the visa lottery favors larger corporations, who have more money and resources to pay the filing fees and help process the applications, compared to smaller companies and startups.
Morrisett said the additional $100,000 fee will create a bigger push for the major corporations to get the H1-B talent.
“It’s devastating for the start-up world. The big tech companies can weather the storm but a lot of start-up companies simply don’t have the money,” he said.
The top companies with H1-B workers during the 2025 fiscal year were Amazon, with over 10,000 employees on the visa, followed by Tata Consulting Services, which has about 5,505, and Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Google, which each have around 5,100, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Jeremy Robbins, the executive director of nonprofit advocacy group the American Immigration Council, told ABC News that smaller start-up firms are crucial for the tech industry’s growth. Every major tech company started off as a smaller mom and pop start-up that blossomed due to the right developer or engineer who cracked the code to bring an app or tech product across the finish line.
“Putting on a flat fee that privileges large companies over small ones, or incentivizes talent to go overseas or incentivizes companies to set up shop overseas, is not an answer,” he said.
Robbins acknowledged that some of the H1-B’s provisions needed tweaking. Some, such as the cap, are frozen in the economic landscape of the early ’90s, he noted. At the time, the country was in recession and falling behind in the tech boom.
“You want to think about how to do that and protect American workers. You would want to treat it differently from a boom time than during a recession,” he said.
Robbins said that Trump’s executive order on the H1-B “cut off the hand to treat a small pain in the finger.”
Trump’s EO creates confusion, fear On Sept. 19, Trump signed the order adding $100,000 to the fees associated with the H1-B visa. He and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the order was to promote American jobs.
“That’s the point of immigration: Hire Americans, and make sure the people coming in are the top, top people,” Lutnick told reporters at the time. “Stop the nonsense of letting people just come into this country.”
When asked if the executive order’s new fee covered first-time H1 applicants or all applicants once it kicked in on Sept. 21, Lutnick responded, “Renewals, first time.”
“The company needs to decide… is the person valuable enough to have a $100,000 a year payment to the government? Or they should head home and go hire an American,” he added.
The actual order, however, had different guidance and the discrepancy led to the frantic letters, according to the experts. The order said that the fee was a one-time charge that would only cover first-time applicants, which led to many companies sending frantic letters to their H1-B employees urging them not to leave the country, according to the American Immigration Council’s Robbins.
He told ABC News that his organization received reports of H1 visa holders who were overseas frantically booking flights to return to the U.S. during the weekend because they and their employers had no concrete information about their legal status.
“It’s thrown everyone into a disarray, and there are still questions as to how this will affect companies and their employees,” he said.
Representatives for Meta, Amazon, Apple and Google did not respond to ABC News’ requests for comment. Representatives from Microsoft declined to comment.
Robbins said that there will likely be legal challenges to the executive order. Federal law allows USCIS to collect fees only for the purpose of processing, since the agency is totally funded by fees, and the president’s power to change immigration law is murky, according to Robbins.
In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that the president’s travel ban was constitutional since he based it off national security concerns. However, two years later, a California federal court blocked a Trump executive order that limited the approval of H1-B visas during the pandemic.
“Stay tuned,” Robbins said when asked about more details about legal challenges.
Ripple effects Whether or not Trump reverses his order either voluntarily or through the courts, the experts said that the American economy — especially the tech industry — will feel the effects of the move for years to come.
Morrisett said that he’s already heard concerns from Cornell Tech’s international students about their future job prospects in America in the wake of the order.
“When a student comes to study here, they get exposed to the tech ecosystem, they have a great idea, they want to create a company, and the start-ups have the tools to make that happen,” he said. “Now there are fewer incentives for them to stay in the country and foster that idea if they don’t have that visa.”
Morrisett added that the H1-B order, combined with the administration’s other actions to limit immigration such as Trump’s travel ban, increased deportation efforts and anti-immigration rhetoric, has tarnished America’s luster in the eyes of current and prospective foreign engineers.
“It is all compounding to the message, ‘We don’t want you in the United States,'” he said. “These are some of the smartest people in the world and they’re saying, ‘OK. We’ll go somewhere else.'”
Anderson said the talent won’t be the only group looking to more welcoming pastures. He noted that companies will be inclined to expand their presence internationally, countering Trump’s goal to strengthen America’s tech footprint.
“Even the smallest firms have international offices and if they want to get that skilled talent, they will go wherever they need to retain them,” Anderson said.
Robbins reiterated that there is definitely a need for reforms for the county’s immigration policies, including the H1-B program, but said leaders must recognize that the visa has been one of the most successful initiatives to expand the country’s tech industry and should not be hampered.
“Putting on a flat fee that privileges large companies over small ones, or incentivizes talent to go overseas or incentivizes companies to set up shop overseas, is not an answer,” he said.
(WASHINGTON) — The Trump administration has committed to partially funding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program with a $4.65 billion payment — but using emergency funds to pay for reduced SNAP benefits could take “a few weeks to up to several months,” a top USDA official told a federal judge in a sworn court filing Monday.
The disclosure comes after a federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the Trump administration to use emergency funds to pay for SNAP amid an ongoing government shutdown by Wednesday. Following the court order on Friday, Trump said it would be his “honor” to fund the food assistance program.
In addition to the delay, the Trump administration also said it was $4 billion short of the expected $8 billion cost to fund SNAP for the month of November, in part because they are declining to tap an additional bucket of emergency funds held by the USDA.
Trump says he has asked court to ‘clarify’ SNAP ruling with funding set to lapse “Defendants have worked diligently to comply with the Court’s order on the short timeline provided by the Court and during a government shutdown,” DOJ lawyers wrote in a filing on Monday.
“I have instructed our lawyers to ask the Court to clarify how we can legally fund SNAP as soon as possible,” Trump posted on social media late Friday. “If we are given the appropriate legal direction by the Court, it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding.”
The $4.65 billion in funding will cover half of the households relying on the food assistance program, according to a declaration from Patrick Penn, Deputy Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services.
That payment will completely expend SNAP’s contingency funding, according to Penn.
“This means that no funds will remain for new SNAP applicants certified in November, disaster assistance, or as a cushion against the potential catastrophic consequences of shutting down SNAP entirely,” he said.
While the Trump administration could use additional funds from tariff revenue, known as Section 32, Penn said the government declined to do so to save the money for child nutrition programs.
“Amid this no-win quandary and upon further consideration following the Courts’ orders, USDA has determined that creating a shortfall in Child Nutrition Program funds to fund one month of SNAP benefits is an unacceptable risk, even considering the procedural difficulties with delivering a partial November SNAP payment, because shifting $4 billion dollars to America’s SNAP population merely shifts the problem to millions of America’s low income children that receive their meals at school,” Penn said.
Beyond the budget shortfall, Penn warned that distributing the reduced benefits could take weeks or months because of “procedural difficulties.”
“There are procedural difficulties that States will likely experience which would affect November SNAP benefits reaching households in a timely manner and in the correctly reduced amounts,” he wrote. “There are procedural difficulties that States will likely experience which would affect November SNAP benefits reaching households in a timely manner and in the correctly reduced amounts.”
