A U.S. immigration judge on Monday ordered a Brazilian woman with family ties to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to be released from a detention center in Louisiana as she fights her potential deportation.Bruna Ferreira – who shares custody of her 11-year-old son with her former fiancé, Leavitt’s brother Michael – was arrested by immigration officers in Massachusetts on Nov. 12 while she was on her way to pick up her son from school and sent to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center.Immigration Judge Cynthia Goodman ordered Ferreira, 33, to be set free on $1,500 bond, the lowest dollar amount possible, Ferreira’s lawyers said. One of those lawyers, Jason Thomas, told Goodman that the U.S. government’s characterization of Ferreira – whom the Trump administration described last month as a “criminal illegal alien” with a previous arrest for battery – is unfair.Ferreira was released Monday night, according Todd Pomerleau, who is also representing Ferreira.The White House had said in a statement that Ferreira had not spoken to Karoline Leavitt in years and that Ferreira had never lived with her son. Trump administration officials have not responded to requests for supporting documentation for the accusations about Ferreira. Court records, family photos and news accounts show that Ferreira lived with her son and shared custody of him with Michael Leavitt. In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Ferreira, who arrived in the United States when she was 6 years old, said she had chosen Karoline Leavitt to be the child’s godmother.At Monday’s hearing, Lucas Vega, a lawyer representing the Department of Homeland Security, did not object to the judge releasing Ferreira from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention. Although the Trump administration has sought to limit bond for undocumented immigrants, Vega said he agreed with Ferreira’s lawyers that she is not a danger to society or a flight risk, and should be released.A longtime Massachusetts resident, Ferreira has no criminal convictions, Thomas said in court, and DHS attorneys did not challenge his account.Thomas told Goodman during the hearing, held via video, that Ferreira has tried multiple times to apply for lawful permanent residency.“She was brought to this country in 1998,” he said. “She’s been continuously living the United States for 27 years.”Ferreira spoke little at the brief hearing in Basile, Louisiana. She appeared wearing ICE-issued orange scrubs and shoes and sat straight-backed at a small wooden table. Behind her, more than a dozen other women sat on benches awaiting their hearings, dressed in yellow, orange and blue prison-style clothing. Immigration detention is civil, not criminal. Thomas told the court that Ferreira was put into deportation proceedings in 2010 and attended her court hearings as required.She had applied for legal residency through several means that were not completed, including a prior marriage to a U.S. citizen that ended in divorce, her lawyers said.In 2014, she qualified for a work permit and protection against deportation through the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. The program sought to allow hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who arrived as children to remain in the country.That year, an immigration judge “administratively closed” her deportation case, her lawyers said. She was enrolled in DACA from 2014-2016 and – after President Donald Trump unsuccessfully tried to end the program during his first term – again from 2019-2021.She continued seeking lawful permanent residency on various grounds, including her allegations that she has had a “history of abusive relationships,” Thomas said.Immigration courts restarted her dormant deportation case after Trump took office this year. Prior administrations had dismissed the court cases of people who were not a priority for deportation, but this year officials have been reopening them as part of the president’s mass-deportation push. Ferreira’s lawyers said she had an immigration court hearing scheduled in Boston next year and hoped to secure a green card, which signifies lawful permanent residency, through that process.That changed when officers arrested her in November and sent her to Basile to face deportation.“They separated her from her family and son just very shortly before the Thanksgiving holiday,” Thomas said. DHS has not answered questions about why it accelerated her case.Thomas told the judge that Ferreira’s arrest last month appears based on an incident in 2008, when she was summoned to Massachusetts juvenile court after purportedly participating in a high school fight when she was 16. Her lawyers said that case doesn’t appear on her record because cases involving juveniles generally are confidential and not criminal in Massachusetts. Her lawyers said the case was dismissed.Her lawyers say her application for permanent residency should be aided by the fact that her brother, sister and son are U.S. citizens, and her mother has a green card. Her past relationship with Karoline Leavitt’s brother, Michael, however, has been an issue in her case.The couple had a son in 2014, the year she obtained DACA and Michael Leavitt won $1 million in a fantasy football contest. The couple broke up the following year, leading to an occasionally contentious custody case over their son in New Hampshire.She and Leavitt traded allegations of abuse, according to state court records. Ferreira wrote in court filings that Michael Leavitt threatened to get her deported. He has denied those allegations.In the interview with The Post, Ferreira said that since her detention, Michael Leavitt and his father have urged her, through conversations with her sister, to voluntarily leave the United States so that she could at some point return legally.Pomerleau called that a “trap” because federal law would bar her from returning for 10 years. This story was originally published at washingtonpost.com. Read it here.