Flávio Bolsonaro, the right-wing Brazilian senator who lost the country’s presidential runoff on Sunday, landed in Miami on Wednesday after leaving Brazil instead of surrendering his passports to the Supreme Court.
Mr. Bolsonaro, 45, arrived shortly after 9 a.m. local time with his wife and two daughters, Bloomberg reported in a dispatch carried by The Australian Financial Review. The family left Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport without speaking to journalists. On Tuesday the State Department had said it would grant all four of them visas.
“The State Department will issue visas to Flavio Bolsonaro and his family and allow them entry into the United States,” a U.S. official said, according to Euronews. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing visa privacy laws. Mr. Bolsonaro is reportedly expected to seek asylum.
His route out ran through Argentina. The family crossed at a bridge on the border, and Argentina’s migration authority said on X that they had carried valid documents and entered “without any legal impediment.” From there they took “a private flight operated by the company Baires Fly S.A. bound for the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador,” the agency said. Earlier in the week, Argentina’s government had said it had “no record of Flávio Bolsonaro entering” the country.
The timeline was muddled for two days. O Globo and other Brazilian outlets reported on Tuesday that he had already reached Miami, and CNN and The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources, also reported a Tuesday arrival. He didn’t appear in public until Wednesday.
On Monday, Justice Alexandre de Moraes of the Supreme Court gave Mr. Bolsonaro 24 hours to hand over his passports. The order is part of an investigation into his alleged links to a lawyer accused of laundering more than $1 billion through a fraud scheme, Time reported. Mr. Bolsonaro, who denies wrongdoing, announced the order himself in a social media video that day and said he had “never thought about leaving the country” and would stay to lead the opposition.
He missed the deadline. Brazil’s Federal Police then canceled the passports, CNN Brasil reported, and a senior Federal Police official said Mr. Bolsonaro had not left through any regular migration checkpoint. It was not clear how he got out.
His legal exposure grew on Tuesday, when a Supreme Court justice ordered the federal police to open a separate inquiry into possible illegal foreign funding of his campaign, including alleged ties to the donor network of Vice President JD Vance. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government has accused the Trump administration of meddling in the election. Washington denies it.
President Trump told reporters early Wednesday that he approved of Mr. Bolsonaro coming to the United States, though he said he had heard the senator was in Argentina, The Hill reported. “The election was very strange, and I thought it was terrible,” Mr. Trump said.
Representative Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, objected. “Losing an election is not grounds for asylum,” he said. “Yet the Trump Administration is giving Flavio Bolsonaro safe haven in the United States.”
Mr. Bolsonaro has not formally conceded. On Sunday night he said he would try to have the result annulled over alleged voting irregularities, but his Liberal Party said Monday that it accepted Mr. Lula’s victory, according to Al Jazeera. He also faces investigations into alleged corruption, money laundering and tax evasion. His father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, is in prison for a coup attempt after the 2022 election.
No warrant had been issued for Mr. Bolsonaro’s arrest when he left Brazil. Legal analysts told Time that ignoring the passport order could be enough to justify one.