Any mother loves to receive phone calls from her children. For Josiele Berto, they are now a lifeline and the only way to know where her 13-year-old son is and what he is facing alone.
“I only talk to him – never to any official who can explain what kind of place it is or what’s going on,” Berto told CNN, speaking in Portuguese.
Last Thursday, she got a call from police in Everett, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, who said her son Arthur had been arrested. She was told to pick him up.
However, Berto left the police station that night without Arthur.
After waiting at the station for more than an hour, the officer told her that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had already taken him away.
“They didn’t give me any information,” said Berto, who is from Brazil and has a pending asylum application with her family since coming to the U.S. in 2021. “I asked where he was taken and they said they’re not allowed to say.”
Berto and her attorney, Andrew Lattarulo, told CNN they spent several days waiting to learn what prompted the arrest, information that finally emerged Tuesday afternoon.
Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria said at a news conference that the teenage boy, who he declined to identify because he is a minor, was arrested last week after Everett police received a “credible tip” accusing him of “making a violent threat against another boy at our public school.”
DeMaria said police did not contact ICE about the juvenile’s arrest and did not contact immigrants in the city, which he said has a large undocumented population. But he was unclear how federal authorities learned of the case and removed the teenager within hours.
“ICE operates independently and has the authority to access certain law enforcement databases and take action independently,” DeMaria said.
Lattarulo said Tuesday night he was still trying to get a police report.
“To my knowledge, (this is) the first time a juvenile has been picked up (by ICE from the Everett Police Department),” Police Chief Paul Strong said at a news conference.
Now Bert’s case is drawing local outrage and national attention after a Department of Homeland Security official went public with a claim contradicted by local police.
The judge ordered ICE to explain the boy’s detention
After learning that her son had been detained by ICE, Bert’s immigration lawyers took the case to federal court, and a Massachusetts judge ordered the government to explain why Arthur’s detention was justified by Tuesday night or give him the chance to be released on bail.
It was not clear Wednesday afternoon if that clarification had been made by the deadline. A judge agreed to allow the filing under seal, but the court document was not included in the online docket, and Lattarulo said CNN had not seen it until Tuesday night.
“The detention violates his Fifth Amendment right to due process,” said a habeas corpus petition filed Friday in Arthur’s case.
The US Attorney’s Office declined to comment on the case.
At first, Berto learned about his son’s whereabouts only through his phone calls. He called her from two different immigration offices, one in Massachusetts and one in Virginia.
“He was crying a lot because he had never been away from home or his family,” Berto said. “He was desperate to say that ICE had taken him.”
Berto told CNN that Arthur recently returned from school because he broke his foot and still needed to wear a walking boot after the cast came off. On Thursday afternoon, he told his aunt that he was going to take the bus to a friend’s house. He told his mother that he had been arrested at a nearby bus stop.
The first details came not from the prosecutor, but from a top spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Record X, responding to media inquiries about the case.
“Here are the facts: He posed a threat to public safety with an extensive rap record, including aggravated assault with a dangerous weapon, battery, breaking and entering, destruction of property,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin announced. “When arrested he was in possession of a firearm and a 5-7 inch knife.”
McLaughlin did not provide further details about the allegations. While Mayor DeMaria confirmed the presence of the knife and said without the arrest, “a tragedy could have occurred in our schools,” he was adamant the teenager did not have a firearm.
“No weapons were found,” DeMaria said.
Because he is a minor, Arthur’s criminal record is not public.
Police on Tuesday declined to provide specific details about the nature of the threat or say which school was involved.
DHS did not respond to CNN’s request Tuesday night for comment on the discrepancy between McLaughlin and DeMaria’s statements about whether the child had a gun.
Berto, who told CNN she was shocked by the allegations, declined to comment on any criminal history and referred questions on the matter to her attorney. Asked about McLaughlin’s comments that Arthur had a “rap sheet,” Lattarulo’s statement to CNN did not say so.
“Regardless of the nature of the allegations, they remain allegations — allegations — and every individual is entitled to due process of law,” Lattarulo said in a statement following McLaughlin’s announcement. “This principle is even more applicable to a minor who is much younger than legal consent.
“It is wrong for DHS to comment publicly on the allegations of a minor. They seem to forget that he is 13, not 31,” Lattarulo added.
An ICE spokesman declined to comment on the case Monday and referred CNN to McLaughlin’s statement.
ICE detainers are transferred from one state to another
Lattarulo criticized Arthur’s transfer to an out-of-state facility, saying it “raises serious concerns about access to counsel and the government’s intent to impede effective legal representation.”
The attorney contacted federal officials about the case only from a Trump administration attorney who reached out Sunday to ask if they would like their case moved from Massachusetts to Virginia because Berto is now being held there.
Lattarulo said he refused to agree to a change of venue, but Judge Richard Stearns on Wednesday ordered the case transferred to Virginia state court.
Stearns said his Massachusetts courtroom was not the proper venue for the petition because Arthur was taken out of state an hour before the case was scheduled to be filed. He added that the teenager deserves a “speedy hearing” under an existing legal settlement for immigration cases involving minors, known as the Flores settlement.
“Therefore, the court agrees with the respondents that it lacks jurisdiction to hear the merits of the petition,” Stearns said.
The game of ICE moving detainees to different states without notifying their families or lawyers is a familiar one.
A view of the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center where Mahmoud Khalil was detained in Jena, Louisiana, in 2025. April 11 Khalil was later released on the orders of a federal judge. – Kathleen Flynn/Reuters
Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate who organized pro-Palestinian protests on campus and was one of the first high-profile arrests of President Donald Trump’s second term, was arrested in New York and briefly detained in New Jersey before being transferred more than a thousand miles away to a facility in Louisiana. He remained there for more than 100 days before a federal judge ordered him released on bail.
Badar Khan Suri, a doctoral student at Georgetown University, ended up in Texas after a tortuous journey through detention facilities in Virginia and Louisiana.
He was released in May after another federal judge said the administration had not presented any evidence that Khan Suri’s detention was necessary.
But Khalil, Khan Suri and others like them have something else in common this year: They’re adults.
“This is my first child case,” Lattarulo told CNN. “This is the youngest I’ve ever done.”
Dozens of community members turned out for an Everett City Council meeting Tuesday night calling for Arthur’s release, CNN affiliate WCVB reported.
“Artur must be returned home now!” said Jessica Gold Boots, a local high school teacher. “Not next week. It has to happen now.”
One councilor called for McLaughlin’s disputed claim that the child had a gun to be retracted.
“Provide an official correction to the misinformation spread online,” said Everett City Councilwoman Katy Rogers.
Other relatives worry about being detained
Without direct access to his parents or lawyers, Berto is unsure of Arthur’s well-being. She says it’s also weighing on her 10-year-old son.
“My younger son keeps asking about him – if he’s calling, if I know anything. It’s been really hard,” she said.
They are also worried about their future.
“Since our asylum process is still pending, we were already afraid, and now the fear has increased,” Berto said. “We don’t know if they’ll come to us next time.”
But whether Arturo’s case will eventually bring his family back to Brazil—willingly or not—is now one of the many unanswered questions they face as Berto waits for her phone to ring again, hoping the next call will be her son.
“Right now, I just want my son to be free,” she said. – We will think about everything else later.
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