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When Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro was sentenced to nearly 30 years in prison for an attempted coup, six other members of his cabinet were also found guilty and all began serving their sentences – except for one.
Days before the verdict, Alexandre Ramagem, Bolsonaro’s former spy chief, fled by car to Guyana and boarded a flight to the United States, where he has remained ever since.
On Monday, he was arrested by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), apparently caught up in Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Ramagem, a former federal police officer, was sentenced to 16 years in prison after the country’s supreme court concluded he had turned the Brazilian intelligence agency into a clandestine counterintelligence unit to illegally monitor officials seen as opponents of Bolsonaro.
Investigators found he had used spy software to track the geolocation of supreme court justices, lawmakers, journalists and public officials. He also monitored investigations involving Bolsonaro’s sons, including the senator Flávio Bolsonaro, who, following his father’s imprisonment, is emerging as a key opposition candidate in this year’s presidential election.
Following his conviction, Ramagem lost his position in the federal police and was stripped of his mandate as a congressman in Brazil’s lower house.
Trump unsuccessfully attempted to influence the trial of his ally Bolsonaro by imposing additional tariffs on Brazil, and many supporters of the far-right Brazilian leader have sought refuge in the US.
During the months he spent as a fugitive in the US, Ramagem even appeared in a live stream hosted by a far-right Brazilian influencer, in which he claimed to have the “approval” of Trump’s government.
During the live stream last November, Ramagem said he had reportedly received a message from someone in the Trump administration saying: “It’s good to know we have a friend who is safe and secure here in the US.”
Although Brazil formally requested his extradition in December, the federal police said he was detained on an immigration matter. He appears in the ICE detainee database as “in custody”, with no details about his location.
Paulo Figueiredo, the far-right Brazilian businessman and influencer who lives in the US, posted on social media that Ramagem was detained after a police stop in Orlando, “initially for a minor traffic violation and then referred to ICE”.
Ramagem has “a pending asylum request, filed some time ago and still under review, which allows him to remain legally in the US until a final decision is made”, wrote Figueiredo, who has also been accused of involvement in the coup attempt but has not yet been tried because Brazilian judicial authorities have been unable to serve him while he has been living in the US for years.
Andrei Rodrigues, the director general of Brazil’s federal police, told GloboNews: “The arrest is the result of international cooperation between Brazil and the US in combating organised crime. Ramagem is a fugitive from Brazilian justice and, according to US authorities, is in an irregular immigration situation.”
