Something seems to be rotten in the US Customs and Border Protection Department (CBP) in Orlando, Florida. Thus begins a Mary Anastasia O’grady article Published this Sunday (27) in one of the main American newspapers, the Wall Street Journal.
The writer shows that a false entry document in the US to Filipe Martins, former president of former President Jair Bolsonaro, was published on the official website of the department twice since 2024. The first fraudulent record served as a pretext to keep Filipe Martins in jail for six months, and since then in house arrest, by order of Minister Alexandre de Moraes. The frame against Filipe Martins can aggravate the siege of the STF minister in the US.
“There is no obvious American motivation to invent a trip by Martins that did not happen. But someone working within the CBP in the name of Brazilian political interests opposed to Bolsonaro would have this motivation,” O’Grady wrote. She reports that CBP refuses to provide the information sought by Martins’s lawyers, who want to know “who created the ghost entrances and when.”
What is worse, crime or covering?
“For US national security reasons,” he argues, “the internal security department should want to know too.” What is worse, asks, “Crime or covering?”
Wall Street Journal columnist assesses that, with little evidence to support her theory that Bolsonaro was plotting a coup against Lula, Moraes refers to award -winning denunciation agreements to build his case. “Things are not going well,” he says. She recalls that in an audio leaked in March, Mauro Cid, the main witness of prosecution, complained that he suffered coercion to testify against Bolsonaro. Filipe Martins himself, in an audience last Thursday, told court that he believes he was arrested, sometimes in inhuman conditions, to force him to report it too. Moraes dodges from criticism by saying that he acts “to defend Brazilian democracy”.
In the article, the columnist notes that mobile records, credit card proof and the manifesto of a commercial flight on Brazilian territory on December 31, 2022 prove that Martins was never in the United States on the alleged date – as reported by the report of Gazeta do Povo.
Forged entry record and reappears
The center of the scandal is the appearance twice of electronic document I-94-which records foreign entries in the US-in the CBP system in Orlando, Florida. The first inclusion of the registration, dated 30 December 2022, occurred in March 2024. After questions of the defense of Martins and the intervention of the Department of Internal Security (DHS), the document was removed in June of that year. But surprisingly, he reappeared in the system this July 2025, according to the writer, with the same mistakes: the name of Filipe Martins written “Felipe” and the number of a declared passport as lost in 2021.
Despite the withdrawal of the fraudulent document of the system in 2024, Minister Alexandre de Moraes continued to support Filipe Martins’s arrest based on this record – still visible in the CBP website “travel history” section, although this area has informal data and without legal validity.
US customs claims “pending dispute”
Martins’s defense filed lawsuits against the internal security department and the CBP in the United States. The lawsuit seeks to access the complete records of the system that would reveal who created the fake entry and when. However, the logs delivered by the US government came with censored passages: neither the name of the person responsible for the inclusion of the data nor the date of manipulation were disclosed, under the justification of confidentiality involving a “pending dispute.”
