A CBP Mystery Points to Lawfare

Who created a fake U.S. record of entry used to keep a Lula critic in Brazilian jail?

Something seems to be rotten at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection office in Orlando, Fla., where a fake U.S. entry document for an adviser to former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been posted on its official website not once but twice since 2024.

Brazilian Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes in Brasilia, Brazil, June 9.

Cellphone data, credit card receipts and the passenger manifest for a commercial flight that Filipe Martins took in Brazil on Dec. 31, 2022, prove that he couldn’t have entered the U.S. late on the night of Dec. 30, 2022, as CBP Orlando first alleged in March 2024. When these facts were brought to the attention of the Homeland Security Department, it agreed that Mr. Martins couldn’t be in two places at one time. In June 2024 it took down a bad entry log. This month it suddenly reappeared on CBP Orlando’s website.

The truth matters to Mr. Martins because he’s being investigated in Brazil by Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes for playing a role in an alleged Bolsonaro conspiracy to overthrow President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. Since there is no Brazilian record of Mr. Martins exiting Brazil, as required by law, Mr. de Moraes says Mr. Martins’s entry into the U.S., as alleged by CBP Orlando, shows he sneaked out of the country and could do it again. Mr. Martins was arrested in February 2024. Since March 2024 Mr. de Moraes has been using false CBP claims to brand Mr. Martins a flight risk.

Naturally Mr. Martins’s lawyers want the record corrected. They also want to know who created the phantom entries and when. CBP refuses to share that information.

For U.S. national security reasons, the Homeland Security Department should also want to know. There is no obvious American motivation for inventing a Martins trip when it didn’t happen. But someone working inside CBP on behalf of Brazilian political interests opposed to Mr. Bolsonaro would have a motivation.

With scant evidence to support his theory that Mr. Bolsonaro was plotting a coup d’état against Lula, Mr. de Moraes is relying on plea deals to build his case. Things aren’t going well. In audio, leaked in March, the prosecution’s star witness can be heard blaming coercion for the testimony he gave against Mr. Bolsonaro. At a pretrial hearing on Thursday, Mr. Martins told the court he believes his detention, at times under inhumane circumstances, is aimed at achieving similar results. When accused by critics of heavy-handed actions, Mr. de Moraes says he’s defending Brazilian democracy.

The legal record at a U.S. port of entry for every traveler is an electronic I-94. Mr. Martins’s lawyer, Ana Bárbara Schaffert, told me last week that when she was working to get her client released in April 2024, she emailed CBP Orlando to request the Martins I-94 for the alleged trip. Orlando replied that it had no Martins I-94 for that date and that his latest entry into the U.S. had been at New York’s Kennedy Airport in September 2022. Since Mr. Martins had properly informed Brazilian authorities of that trip, she was satisfied that the matter had been resolved.

Two weeks later, Mr. Martins hadn’t been released. So Ms. Schaffert called the CBP office at Kennedy to get a copy of the aforementioned September 2022 I-94. An official there surprised her by telling her that the computer was now showing a Martins I-94 for Dec. 30, 2022, in Orlando. Mr. Martins’s name was misspelled on the I-94 and the document number was from a passport reported lost in 2021.

Mr. Martins was imprisoned for 183 days, long after the fraudulent I-94 was deleted from the CBP webpage and the Brazilian court had been provided the correction. In August 2024 he was released from prison but is under domiciliary arrest in Ponta Grossa, Paraná state. Mr. de Moraes hasn’t acknowledged the false travel narrative. He continues to rely on the CBP’s never-corrected “travel history” webpage—which is not a legal record—to justify Mr. Martins’s detention. He may not leave his city of residence. He wears an ankle monitor and is banned from speaking to the press or using social media.

Mr. Martins’s lawyer received no response from a complaint she filed with the Homeland Security inspector general. She also filed two Freedom of Information Act requests asking for the logs that would show who created the entry records and when. She says a “generic answer” came back claiming they “didn’t have the information to respond.” In January she filed a lawsuit in Florida against Homeland Security and CBP to secure the I-94 document logs. In an effort to settle, officials produced them but redacted the name of the person who created them and the dates they were created. DHS told me last week it couldn’t comment due to “pending litigation.”

This month CBP gave Brazilian prosecutors another assist by reposting the fake Martins I-94 on its website, complete with the misspelling of Mr. Martin’s first name and the lost passport number.

What’s worse? The crime or the coverup?

Write to O’Grady@wsj.com