Trump ally asked DHS official to detain mother of his child over custody battle

In June last year, the wife of former modeling agent turned presidential envoy Paolo Zampolli was detained by ICE then deported. That in itself was not all that unusual in an era of mass deporation. What made the situation unique was the fact that Zampolli is a decades-long friend of President Donald Trump — who actually introduced Trump to Melania Trump — and that it was Zampolli himself who had his wife arrested by ICE, allegedly due to an ongoing custody battle over their child.

Brazilian Amanda Ungaro — then age 17 — first flew to the United States in 2002 on the private jet of infamous underage sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Though she says she never saw Epstein again, she soon met Zampolli, then 32. Two years later, their relationship became romantic, and Ungaro was brought into the Trumps’ orbit, eventually securing her an ambassadorship to Grenada after Trump became president. While Ungaro and Zampolli never married, they did have a son together.

Then in 2023, Ungaro — scandalized by Zampolli’s public partying with young women — left him and married another man, bringing their son with her and initiating a bitter custody battle.

Suddenly last June, Ungaro and her husband were arrested for fraud. Ungaro, it turned out, was not in the U.S. legally, her visa having expired four years earlier.

Zampolli seized on the opportunity and began leveraging contacts within the administration in an attempt to bring her lack of legal status to the attention of ICE. This, he communicated to ICE official David Venturella, “would help him gain custody of their son.”

Venturella then contacted the ICE office in Miami, where Ungaro was still in jail pending her fraud charges. Shortly after that, she was placed in ICE detention. This, she assumed, would result in the loss of custody of her son, so she asked a judge to deport her back to Brazil.

Since then, the estranged couple’s teenage son has split his time living between his parents as they continue to duke out custody in court.

While there has been some question as to whether Zampolli’s actions had any major impact on Ungaro’s case as she was already flagged for detention, the New York Times points out that her detention could have potentially been avoided due to a combination of the overcrowded facilities in Florida and ICE policies regarding cases where minors are involved.

Ungaro was unaware that her ex had gotten an ICE official to intervene in her case, and was appalled when she was notified, saying, “It’s devastating that they could have affected what happened to me.”

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