Brazil presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro campaigning at Espaco Inter in Guarulhos, Brazil on October, 21, 2026.Eduardo Carmim/Sport Press Photo/Zuma
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The State Department plans to give Flávio Bolsonaro, the defeated right-wing Brazilian presidential candidate and Donald Trump ally, and his family US visas to enter the country. At the same time, Trump’s government continues to implement widespread restrictions on new visas while it suspends and revokes existing ones.
As my colleague Isabela Dias noted Tuesday, Bolsonaro is defying an order by Brazil’s Supreme Court barring him from leaving and surrendering his passports by Tuesday. Bolsonaro is under multiple investigations for alleged involvement in a money-laundering scheme and tax evasion.
On Wednesday, Argentina’s federal migration agency said that Bolsonaro and his family entered the country from Brazil on Tuesday night. The group then boarded a flight to Ecuador and, according to a US official who spoke to the New York Times, landed in Miami on Wednesday morning. Bolsonaro and his family then got into an S.U.V. to leave the airport, hidden under umbrellas.
Bolsonaro—and, of course, Trump has denied the election results, despite the fact that Bolsonaro’s own party has since recognized left-leaning President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva reelection.
As Isabela wrote on Tuesday, Bolsonaro’s departure for the US isn’t a surprise:
America has become the default destination for several Bolsonaro or Bolsonaro-adjacent figures on the radar of Brazilian authorities, including the grandson of a former military dictator and a far-right influencer once described as “the fake-news kingpin of Brazil” who is considered to be a fugitive from justice. Chiefly among them is Flávio’s brother, Eduardo, a key go-between of the Brazilian far right and Trump’s circle who’s been “self-exiled” in the United States since early 2025.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is gutting the legal visa system and enforcing a long list of new travel bans on immigrants and visitors over “foreign policy, national security, and counterterrorism” concerns. In January, the State Department halted immigrant visa applications for people from 75 countries, largely from the Global South, claiming residents from those countries are of “nationalities at high risk of public benefits reliance.”
A federal judge in New York invalidated the visa ban in August, saying it violates the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965’s prohibition on nationality-based discrimination in issuing visas.
“This latest attempt by the Trump administration to enforce its white nationalist worldview through US immigration policy is, like the others, equal parts retrograde and unlawful,” Baher Azmy, Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told my colleague Sophie Hurwitz the day after the ruling was invalidated.
While Trump weaponizes the immigration system, it apparently helps to be an ally of the administration. Maria Martha Bruno, the coordinator of international partnerships at Agência Pública, Brazil’s largest nonprofit newsroom, and Isabela wrote on Sunday that, under President Lula, the US has also hounded Brazil:
The Trump administration imposed 50 percent tariffs on Brazilian goods and sanctions on judicial authorities as retribution for the alleged political “persecution” of Jair Bolsonaro. It also revoked the visa of Brazil’s ambassador to the United States, Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, in retaliation for an alleged delay on the Brazilian government’s side to formally approve the administration’s new pick for the role.
