Three years ago, Amanda Ungaro was dining with Donald and Melania Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Last summer, she was sleeping on the floor of an immigration detention center with no windows and no sunlight, waiting to be deported to a country she had left as a teenager.
The distance between those two scenes comes down to a single phone call — and the story of who made it is one of the clearest pictures yet of what ICE has become under the second Trump administration: a personal weapon for the people closest to power.
According to a March investigation by The New York Times, the man who placed that call was Paolo Zampolli — the former modeling agent who introduced Trump to Melania in 1998 and now holds the title of presidential special envoy for global partnerships.
Zampolli and Ungaro share a teenage son, and last June the two were locked in a bitter custody fight.
When Zampolli learned that his ex had been arrested on fraud charges at her Florida workplace and was sitting in a Miami jail, he reached out to David Venturella, a top ICE official and longtime private-prison executive.
Venturella then called ICE’s Miami field office to make sure agents picked Ungaro up before she could post bail — noting, according to the reporting, that the matter was important to someone close to the White House.
She was taken into ICE custody. Three and a half months later, she was gone.
From the Guest List to a Holding Cell
Ungaro’s life reads like a cautionary tale about proximity to powerful men. Born in Brazil, she left home at 13 to model and arrived in New York at 17 — flown in on Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane from Paris by an agent who scouted girls for him.
She has said the cabin was full of young girls, some who looked no older than 14, and that she kept to herself, frightened, with no idea where she was. She never saw Epstein again.
But she did meet Zampolli, sign with his agency, and begin a relationship that lasted roughly two decades and produced a son.
Along the way, both she and Zampolli even served as United Nations ambassadors during Trump’s first term.
When the relationship ended and she remarried — a Brazilian doctor, a new life in Florida — the machinery of the state was still within her ex’s reach.
In June 2025, Ungaro says, roughly ten officers stormed the home she shared with her husband at six in the morning. She was pulled into the hallway in her pajamas, made to face the wall, and handcuffed in front of her son — a minor, who was taken to the station because there was no one else to leave him with.
What followed is exactly the kind of treatment Resist Hate has documented again and again inside ICE facilities.
Ungaro described a windowless hall packed with more than 120 people, a wet floor, four days without seeing the sun, and being held alongside people accused of killing children.
She says she left infested with lice. With no real path out, she eventually asked a judge to deport her just to escape the conditions.
She returned to Brazil — a place she’d left at 13 — with nothing but the uniform on her back.
The Denials, and Why They Strain Belief
Everyone in a position to be blamed has denied wrongdoing. Zampolli told the Times he never asked for any favor and only wanted to understand his ex’s case.
The Department of Homeland Security insisted that Ungaro was removed solely over an expired visa and fraud charges, and that any claim of political “reasons or favors is FALSE”.
Maybe so. The Times itself noted Ungaro might have been deported regardless. But that misses the point.
A presidential confidant picked up the phone, a senior ICE official moved within hours, and the case was flagged internally as mattering to someone near the president.
Ordinary immigrants do not get that treatment — except the part where they get detained.
Zampolli’s own history is its own kind of tell: his name appears repeatedly in the released Epstein files, and in one 2011 email Epstein warned a business contact that “zampoli is trouble. Lots.”
Enter Melania
Here’s where the story turned into a national spectacle. In early April, a series of escalating posts in Ungaro’s name appeared on X and aimed straight at the first lady — threatening legal action and warning, “Maybe you should be afraid of what I know.”
Within hours, Melania Trump held a surprise, roughly six-minute press conference denying any relationship with Epstein and calling the reports about her “lies.”
Her office said she had no knowledge of the affairs between Zampolli and Ungaro and no contact with ICE.
The timing is striking, and plenty of observers have drawn the obvious line between Ungaro’s threats and Melania’s sudden need to address the public.
We don’t need them to be true to see the part that already is.
But it’s worth being clear-eyed: the most explosive claims swirling around what Ungaro supposedly “knows” about how Melania and Donald really met remain unverified, and outlets that reviewed them were unable to confirm their authenticity.
The Part That’s Already True
Strip away the Epstein intrigue and a stark fact remains. A woman who once posed with the president was handcuffed in front of her child, held in degrading conditions, and shipped out of the country — and a man with a White House title appears to have helped make it happen during a custody dispute.
If that can happen to someone who used to be on the Trump Family’s guest list, ask what’s happening every single day to the people who have never been on a guest list.
That is the system. Ungaro’s case just exposed the wiring.
The ‘Amanda Ungaro v. Melania Trump’ drama continues on X. Ungaro recently revealed a new, juicy development involving the location of her cell phone.
Ungaro discovered that her phone had allegedly been removed from the police station where it has been sitting since her arrest.
How did she find out that her phone is now allegedly in the hands of Paolo Zampolli? Using a skill every “woman scorned turned detective” possesses — she used the Find My Phone app installed on all Apple devices.
