REVERE, MASS. (WHDH) – (CNN) — Bruna Ferreira had rushed out of her Massachusetts home, shoelaces untied, and was driving to pick up her 11-year-old son from school when she was approached by unmarked vehicles and a “swarm of people.”
The 33-year-old woman, the mother of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s nephew, was being surrounded by federal immigration agents asking her to confirm her name, she told CNN’s Erin Burnett Friday in an interview.
The November 12 arrest near Boston at first felt like a traffic stop – but seemed bizarre as agents already seemed to know her name, the Brazilian native said.
“How could you possibly know who I am and where I live?” Ferreira asked.
While agents took her to the nearby Revere Police Department to verify her identity, Ferreira started calling her emergency contacts to make sure her son was picked up from school.
“I just started panicking, trying to see if I could get somebody, an emergency contact, anybody to answer me, to pick up Michael from school,” she said.
Ferreira was previously engaged to her son’s father, Michael Leavitt, her attorney Todd Pomerleau previously told CNN. Michael Leavitt is the brother of Karoline Leavitt.
An immigration judge ordered for her to be released from the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile earlier this week.
During the 26 days in immigration custody, Ferreira was taken from Massachusetts to facilities in four other states before she was taken to Louisiana – more than 1,500 miles from where she was arrested, she said.
Once she arrived at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, Ferreira was “by the grace of God” able to use another woman’s phone minutes to make a call and let her family and attorney know where she was, she said.
She wasn’t able to speak to her son during her detainment, where she met many other mothers in her same situation, and they all prayed for one another, which helped her get through the “horrible…