Amanda Ungaro deportation highlights the human cost of aggressive immigration enforcement under Trump’s second term, raising questions about due process, detention conditions, and power dynamics in high-profile cases.
After spending nearly half her life in the United States, 41-year-old Brazilian Amanda Ungaro was deported from the country last October. She endured three hellish months in a detention center until she was expelled, like more than 600,000 immigrants since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 and set out to carry out “the largest deportation in history.”
What is unusual in the case of this former model who worked at the United Nations is that, alongside her former partner and the father of her son, businessman Paolo Zampolli, Ungaro had in the past shared evenings with the Trumps at the family’s Mar-a-Lago mansion, including a party to ring in 2022, which she now recalls as one of those “incredibly boring six-hour events.”
The two couples also spent other New Year’s Eves together, a White House Easter children’s party, a Fourth of July celebration… All meticulously documented on Instagram by Zampolli, the man who introduced Melania to the president and who was appointed special envoy for global partnerships by his friend. The Brazilian woman and the Italian American, who separated in 2023 after two decades together, are engaged in a bitter custody battle over their 16-year-old son, G.
“Now it’s war. We’ll see who wins. I kept quiet for years, and because of that, people judge me. They ask me, why are you speaking now? Because the man would not let me live in peace! I tried. I left the relationship with nothing, left my son at boarding school, and went to work,” Ungaro said last Tuesday in an interview at her new home, a penthouse in Rio de Janeiro. “It was not enough for him to destroy me during 20 years of relationship: he wanted to destroy me again when I started a new life, when I got married.”
Ungaro left New York and Washington behind. Having settled in Aventura, Florida, with her husband, everything fell apart last June. “Ten police officers stormed into our home, arrested me, and took my son to the police station,” she says. She and her husband, a Brazilian doctor, were arrested and charged with fraud at a cosmetic clinic following anonymous tips. She denies the charges, emphasizing that her deportation from the U.S. prevented her from defending herself. She insists that “the truth will come to light.” They put her in a cell, “with child murderers!” “Me, who has no criminal record. I was terrified,” she recalls.
When Zampolli learned that his ex-girlfriend was being held in custody, he contacted a senior official at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) so that she would remain jailed and be deported, thereby allowing him to secure the custody of their sons that he had long sought, according to The New York Times. ICE complied with his request. Zampolli, reached by phone by EL PAÍS, denies any wrongdoing.
Deportation
Handcuffed at the hands and feet, she was transferred to an immigration detention center in Miami, where she spent three and a half months in complete horror. Her husband, who had a green card (permanent residency permit), was released. “I volunteered to scrub the floors at six in the morning so I wouldn’t go crazy. I spent the whole day crying; I read the Bible from beginning to end,” she says. She helped others, sharing with them her phone credit to make calls. She claims that there were detainees with residency permits, an octogenarian handcuffed in a wheelchair, and a young woman who had just lost a baby and had to wait a long time to receive medical care…
To proceed with the deportation, she was taken to Louisiana. “It was a hall with more than 120 people, the floor was wet, there were no windows, four days without seeing the sun… I came out infested with lice,” she recounts. She landed in Brazil wearing the prison uniform, with nothing, not even a cell phone. “I spent a month depressed in a room.”
Ungaro regrets not having left Zampolli sooner — and not having reported him. “I was living at the mercy of a sick psychopath who abused me psychologically, sexually, and physically. I asked many people for help. No one ever helped me. But I couldn’t leave without my son, and he would not sign [the authorization],” she says.
Brazil Outraged Ater US Deportees Arrive Handcuffed, Colombia Agrees to Accept Deportation Flights
