Si desea leer este artículo en español visite El Planeta.
Sinvalda Oliveira of Marlborough says she voted for Donald Trump for president in 2024 because she wanted to see a tighter border and fewer immigrants flooding into the country.
But the Brazilian immigrant and naturalized U.S. citizen says she didn’t expect Trump’s campaign promise to remove “criminals” from the country to expand to local Brazilian construction workers, nannies and house cleaners, including one of her own friends.
“He was just sitting inside his car in the parking lot of his apartment. And they detained him and they deported him,” she said.
Now the 56-year-old longtime aesthetician says her business is floundering, many of her clients are staying home and she’s worrying about the future.
“If these raids keep going, we’re all going to go broke,” Oliveira told GBH News recently. “All the bakeries, all of the markets, we’re not making enough money to pay our employees. It’s crazy. It is horrible. It’s not right.”
Brazilians make up the largest immigrant community in Massachusetts with about 140,000 people, the vast majority born outside of the country, according to a 2024 report by the Latino Equity Fund and The Boston Foundation. They also are feeling impacts of the Trump deportation effort in bigger numbers than other immigrant communities in the state.
Leaning conservative as a community, Brazilians supported former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro — and according to immigrant advocates and researchers, many also supported Trump in the last election.
With hundreds of Brazilian nationals arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement this year, many in Massachusetts’ largest immigration population have been going underground — and some are questioning the way they vote.
From January through late July, ICE arrested about 2,800 people in Massachusetts. Of those, a quarter — approximately 780 people — were Brazilian, according to ICE data obtained by the nonprofit Deportation Data Project. That’s nearly three times as many Brazilians detained by federal agents in the full year before.
There is no specific data available of how local Brazilians voted in the 2024 election. But what information is available suggests that Brazilian immigrants voted for Trump in large numbers — and, now, some are retreating from their support.
Seventy-six percent of Brazilians in the Boston area voted for the right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 election runoff, according to a recent study from Boston University. Taylor Boas, a Latin America specialist and author of the study, said he’s found that local support for Bolsonaro and Trump align.
“A lot of Brazilians in the Boston area are pretty favorable toward Trump, or at least were,” he said.
A poll by the Instituto de Pesquisa IDEIA, a Brazil-based research group, found that 35% of Brazilian Americans across the United States favored Trump in the lead-up to the 2024 election — still a minority but more than triple the percentage that supported him in 2016.
Heloisa Maria Galvão, co-founder of the Brazilian Women’s Group in Brighton, an immigration assistance group, said even among clients facing deportation, some continue to back Trump — including one who was deported to Brazil earlier this year.
“His kids were born in the United States, and his wife has an end-of-life disease. He wasn’t a citizen, but he was campaigning for Trump. And people were asking us, ‘Why are you going to help him?’ And I said, ‘I don’t care. It is unjust that he’s been deported,’” she said.
There is no publicly available data to determine how many former Brazilian supporters have turned away from Trump since his election.
But among all Latinos, including Brazilians, recent polling finds a steep decline. Anothersurvey found that almost one in 10 Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 said they would not vote for him if the election were held now. Nine percent said they were unsure.
Lenita Reason, executive director of the nonprofit Brazilian Worker Center in Allston, says there is unprecedented fear in the community as mask-wearing federal officials make headlines for smashing people’s car windows and arresting immigrants.
She says that some clients arrested by ICE were “disappeared” from the streets, with their families often not knowing their whereabouts for days.
“People are very stressed,” she said. “Every time they see a black car or car with windows with shades, there’s stress.”
Graeme Blair, co-director of the Deportation Data Project, says the Trump administration is targeting large Brazilian population centers as a way “it can arrest, detain and deport the most number of people in the shortest amount of time.”
“We have been here for three decades. We have never seen anything like this. It’s terror in the community,” said Galvão of the Brazilian Women’s Group.
Galvão is working with dozens of Brazilian families torn apart by detentions and deportations. Most, she says, have lost their primary breadwinners, leaving families unable to pay rent, utilities or buy food.
Even U.S. citizens like Renata Nunes say they fear for their safety. Nunes told GBH News she worries that the current administration is threatening to strip citizenship from people not born in the United States.
Nunes, 27, said she arrived in the country as a child and was raised by her grandmother in Marlborough, a city with anestimated 3,000 Brazilians.
“I thought that, ‘OK, at least I’m untouchable — my mom is untouchable, my family’s untouchable,’” she said. “And the realization that that’s not true and the fear ... sort of set in.”
She’s seen far fewer people shopping at Brazilian markets in the Framingham area, which has the region’s largest percentage of Brazilian residents. She said undocumented friends and acquaintances are increasingly afraid to leave their homes as ICE raids intensify in the Boston area. Nunes shares their fear.
“My grandmother lived through the dictatorship in Brazil. And seeing what’s happening now, I never thought that I would have to deal with something that she dealt with,” she said.
Oliviera, a registered Republican who supported Trump in 2024, says she will sit out the 2028 election if current immigration policies are still in place.
“We cannot live afraid that you’re going to close down your business,” she said. “We cannot live much longer with this craziness about immigration.”
Others are simply choosing to leave the United States all together. Consider the case of a woman who spoke to GBH News recently, and requested anonymity for fear for her safety.
The woman — in her late 30s, carrying her belongings in two bags — said she had arrived in the country six years ago after leaving her home state of Minas Gerais with hopes of a better life. But those aspirations were dashed three months ago when her husband, who washed cars for a living, was arrested by federal agents in Allston and transferred to an ICE processing center in Louisiana.
Now, the woman said she was flying back to Brazil to avoid a similar fate. She opted for what the Trump administration calls “self-deportation,” rather than risk possible detention for her and her elementary-school age children. “I’m afraid that they might be picked up, jailed and deported,” she said.
The woman didn’t want to talk about her political views. She had more pressing problems.
About 18 hours after taking off, she landed in Belo Horizonte with her two children. She spoke to a freelance journalist who recorded her arrival at GBH News’ request.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do now,” she said. “I’m sort of lost.”
Reporter Carlos Gimenes contributed to this story from Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
