ORLEANS — Thiago Bastos, 27, who lives in Hyannis with his children, ages 4 and 5, his girlfriend, and her toddler, was arrested by state police on Saturday, May 10 in Orleans. He was charged with driving under the influence of alcohol, failing to stop for the police, negligent operation of a motor vehicle, and a marked lanes violation.

He pleaded not guilty to those charges at Orleans District Court on Monday morning, May 12, and a public defender, Brendan Burchell of Centerville, was appointed to represent him.
Only a few minutes later, Bastos was arrested in the courthouse parking lot by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
Burchell was still in the courtroom when a court officer pulled him aside and said that ICE agents had arrested his client, he told the Independent. By the time Burchell made it outside, Bastos and the agents were gone.
Cape and Islands District Attorney Rob Galibois told the Independent that ICE does not inform his office when it arrests people he is prosecuting, and that his prosecutors typically learn about ICE arrests from defense attorneys who mention it before or during scheduled court dates.
“None of our employees witnessed [Bastos’s] arrest,” Galibois said, adding that “the prosecutor that was handling that case was advised of it by the defense attorney.”
Galibois said that, besides Bastos, he has not heard about any other arrests of defendants at criminal courts on the Cape and Islands this year.
A member of Bastos’s family who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal told the Independent that Bastos called at 9:18 a.m. while he was still speaking with the agents. He had not initially realized that the officers, wearing plainclothes, were ICE agents; they had waved Bastos over and made light conversation before identifying themselves and asking for his identification documents and immigration status, the family member said.
Bastos told the officers he was applying for a green card, and he called his relative to get the “alien number,” or A-number, connected to his application.
The agents told Bastos that his A-number wasn’t appearing in their system, and they needed to take him to the ICE Boston field office in Burlington to check his status, the family member said.
When the family member next heard from Bastos it was two days later, May 14, when Bastos called from the Plymouth County Correctional Facility — the only jail in Massachusetts with a contract to house ICE detainees. Bastos said that ICE had confined him at the Burlington field office for two days, where he slept on the floor.
Bastos had come to the U.S. from Brazil when he was 11 years old and has not been there since, his family member told the Independent. He attended Kennedy Middle School in Woburn and Barnstable High School and has worked as a carpenter. His children, who are U.S. citizens, believe that he is on an extended work trip, and that when he returns, they will move to a bigger house. But without his income, the family is being evicted from their home.
Sensitive Locations
ICE arrested Bastos during “Operation Patriot,” a month-long immigration enforcement operation that swept through Massachusetts in May.

According to a June 2 press release from ICE, the operation targeted “transnational organized crime, gangs and egregious illegal alien offenders” and resulted in nearly 1,500 arrests — although the Boston Globe reported that only 17 percent of those arrested had a criminal conviction, 37 percent had pending criminal charges, and 46 percent had no criminal record at all.
According to records at the Barnstable and Orleans district courts, Bastos had multiple previous motor vehicle charges — including driving without a license, driving with a suspended license, and using an electronic device while driving — all of which had been dismissed.
Thomas Rugo, an attorney hired to represent Bastos after he was arrested by ICE, told the Independent his client has no prior criminal convictions.
Before his arrest, Bastos had not been worried about immigration enforcement, his family member said.
“He never thought ICE would approach him — he came here when he was 11 years old — and I asked him, ‘Have you lost your mind, thinking you’re an American?’ ” his family member said.
Whenever local or state police arrest someone, the home address and fingerprints in the arrest report are run through Dept. of Homeland Security and FBI databases that ICE can also access, according to the National Immigration Law Center.
“Even a minor encounter with local law enforcement may trigger ICE involvement — even if criminal charges are later dropped or never even filed,” Mass. Attorney General Andrea Campbell wrote in a guide to immigrant families released on May 29.
According to Oren Sellstrom, the litigation director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, courthouses are one of several “sensitive locations” where ICE traditionally has not conducted federal immigration enforcement, along with schools, health-care facilities, and places of worship.
ICE activity around courthouses ramped up during the first Trump administration, Sellstrom said. In 2019, Lawyers for Civil Rights challenged ICE’s courthouse arrest policies in court.
In April 2021, the Biden administration set tighter standards limiting immigration enforcement at criminal courthouses. “As law enforcement officers and public servants, we have a special responsibility to ensure that access to the courthouse — and therefore access to justice, safety for crime victims, and equal protection under the law — is preserved,” the April 2021 memo reads.
The Biden administration then published a longer list of “protected areas,” including playgrounds, homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, and political rallies, in October 2021.
In January 2025, the Trump administration canceled the Biden limitations and issued a new directive that removed restrictions on immigration enforcement at courthouses.
Now, the Trump administration has become “much more aggressive in undertaking federal immigration enforcement in a number of different sensitive locations, including courthouses,” Sellstrom said.
ICE presence at courthouses has a “chilling effect,” Sellstrom said, because victims, defendants, witnesses, and family members may no longer feel safe showing up in court.
“What we want to encourage in this country is that people follow the rule of law and feel like they have access to the judicial process,” Sellstrom said. “That’s what our country is built on. Equal justice for all.”
Due Process
On May 29, Bastos had an immigration bond hearing at which Judge Donald Ostrom considered whether to release him from ICE detention while his removal proceedings take place. Bastos was denied bond, his family member said.

That same day, ICE transferred Bastos from Plymouth to FCI Berlin, a medium-security federal prison in northern New Hampshire that is among a handful of federal prisons nationwide that house ICE detainees.
“It is harrowing to imagine that people facing civil — not criminal — charges are being sent to a medium-security federal prison in the northernmost city in the entire state, isolated from their family, advocates, and potential legal services,” Gilles Bissonnette, legal director at the ACLU of New Hampshire, said in a March 6 press release. “We have strong concerns about the conditions that will exist for hundreds of these immigrants and how they will be treated in this prison.”
On June 24, Bastos’s new attorney for his DUI case, Rugo, appeared at a pretrial hearing in Orleans and told the court that Bastos was in ICE custody. Bastos was not at the hearing, and Judge Robert A. Welsh III submitted a writ of habeas corpus the next day requesting his presence at a rescheduled Aug. 26 pretrial hearing to be conducted online.
“The rules provide that a hearing shall be conducted within 30 days, and trial shall be conducted within one year,” Rugo told the Independent. While pretrial hearings can be held online, Rugo said that the trial must be in person. “At the ultimate trial he has a right, under the Constitution, to confront his accusers,” he said.
As for the possibility that Bastos could be deported before his trial date, Rugo said, “We don’t know where this is going. I don’t know what will happen. I haven’t had this experience until now.”
Bastos also has an online “immigration merit hearing” scheduled for Sept. 5 at which Judge Natalie Smith of the Chelmsford Immigration Court will decide whether he will be deported or granted relief.
Although the arrest of Bastos is the only one that Galibois had heard about that was in or near a Cape Cod courthouse this year, Bastos is not the only criminal defendant who has been taken before his trial was finished, Galibois said.
“We’ve had several defendants who were picked up during the pendency of their case,” said Galibois.
“In the cases where defendants have been picked up by ICE and deported, we have to go back to the victims and say we can’t proceed, we can’t seek justice on your behalf, and that’s incredibly frustrating,” Galibois said. “Every defendant is entitled to a trial by jury, and there’s due process that needs to be followed, so the removal of a defendant during the pendency of a case obviously denies them those rights.”
For now, Bastos’s family is struggling to pay legal fees and care for his children, who ask to call their father every day. Sometimes, family members pretend to call Bastos, knowing that he is out of minutes, so that the children can leave him messages.
Both children keep getting sick, his family member said, adding that sickness is the way they express their feelings: “Because with no explanation, their father has disappeared.”
Paul Benson contributed reporting.