Former Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro’s presence in the U.S. has turned into a diplomatic quandary for President Joe Biden after Bolsonaro's supporters stormed government buildings in Brasilia over the weekend.
A former aide said Monday that Bolsonaro has been hospitalized near Orlando, Florida, with abdominal pains, after being spotted in the area in recent days including at a Publix supermarket and a KFC restaurant.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said Monday that the U.S. hasn’t received an extradition request for Bolsonaro from Brazil. Behind the silence from Brasilia, Biden’s team isn’t weighing its options. Administration officials are considering whether they can do anything to spur Bolsonaro to leave the U.S., according to people familiar with the conversations.
The discussions of the options are at an early stage, and have included asking him to leave or exploring grounds to cancel his visa, the people said. They asked not to be identified because no decisions have been made.
Thousands of Bolsonaro supporters invaded Brazil’s congress, supreme court and presidential palace on Sunday, an incident with strong parallels to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump. Bolsonaro and Trump are political allies who both pursued populist and nationalist agendas and endorsed each other’s re-election bids.
They also both fanned suspicions about their country’s election systems and refused to concede after their defeats. Bolsonaro arrived in the U.S. on Dec. 30 while he was still president, skipping the inauguration of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
A Brazilian senator asked top court Justice Alexandre de Moraes on Monday to order Bolsonaro’s immediate return to the country.
Senator Renan Calheiros said Bolsonaro needs to explain his alleged encouraging of rioters who stormed Brasilia. He asked the court to issue an arrest order if the former president refuses to cooperate with the investigation.
Moraes, who presides over an investigation of alleged acts against Brazil’s democracy, has already issued several arrest warrants for Bolsonaro’s supporters.
One challenge for U.S. officials seeking to hasten Bolsonaro’s departure is figuring out how he got into the U.S. There is uncertainty about what visa he obtained within the administration, the people familiar with the matter said. He possibly used his diplomatic passport, but could have also used a personal passport and be visiting Florida on a tourist visa.
His presence in the state — and images of him visiting local restaurants and grocery stores — were initially the subject of online mockery. But Bolsonaro’s Florida residence became serious after the Brasilia riot, driven by unfounded claims among his supporters that the Brazilian election was rigged.
Bolsonaro condemned the destruction of public property, taking to Twitter to say “depredations and invasions of public buildings like we saw today, like the acts done by the left in 2013 and 2017, are not within the rules.”
The protests had echoes of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol in the U.S. Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist who championed false claims of a rigged 2020 U.S. presidential election ahead of the insurrection, used his War Room podcast and posts on the social-media site Gettr to push the idea the Brazilian election was stolen and to support the rioters.
Bannon posted on Gettr on Oct. 30 after Lula defeated Bolsonaro “this Election Was Stolen in Broad Daylight.” Bannon called the rioters “Brazilian Freedom Fighters” on Gettr and said, “Lula stole the Election, Brazilians know that.”
The comments were in keeping with Bannon’s past support for Bolsonaro and his family. After Trump lost, Bannon advised Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo and suggested Bolsonaro’s Brazil was an embodiment of the style of right-wing nationalism Trump had sought to impose in the U.S.
“In many ways, Brazil’s movement is actually far more advanced than we are in the United States,” Bannon told Bloomberg at the time.
Some Democratic lawmakers have urged Biden to extradite Bolsonaro, adding to pressure on the administration. Representatives Joaquin Castro of Texas and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York condemned the actions of Bolsonaro’s supporters as domestic terrorism.
“The U.S. must cease granting refuge to Bolsonaro in Florida,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a tweet. “Nearly two years to the day the U.S. Capitol was attacked by fascists, we see fascist movements abroad attempt to do the same in Brazil."
Administrations in the past have moved quickly to respond to such extradition requests, when they come. In 2018, the U.S. extradited ex-Panama President Ricardo Martinelli, who was later acquitted on espionage and embezzlement charges.
“We have not as of yet received any official request from the Brazilian government related to this issue,” Sullivan said. “If and when we do we’ll deal with it and if and when we have any information to provide, we will do it.”
Bolsonaro does not yet face criminal charges in Brazil, meaning the Lula government has no basis for an extradition request. That could change as its investigation into the riots proceeds. His hospitalization follows several surgeries since he was stabbed in the abdomen while campaigning in 2018.
While declining to discuss Bolsonaro individually, State Department spokesman Ned Price said that people who travel to the U.S. on what’s know as an A visa, which is reserved for government officials and diplomats, have 30 days to change their immigration status if they leave their job while in the U.S.
“It would be incumbent on the visa holder to take that action,” Price said. “If an individual has no basis on which to be in the United States, that individual is subject to removal by the Department of Homeland Security.”
Asked if the U.S. was waiting for Lula’s government to reach out, Sullivan said “I don’t want you to take that as the implication.”
“The United States takes action on visas all the time, for all kinds of reasons,” Sullivan said. “On this particular case, this particular individual, again, I have to proceed with extreme caution in terms of how I talk about it because of the legal issues and precedent issues involved.”
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(Bloomberg News writer Josh Wingrove contributed to this article.)
