He Was Convicted of Murder in Brazil. ICE Caught Him at a Massachusetts Courthouse — Two Days Before the State Banned That Kind of Arrest.
- 14 Years, 3 Months the Brazilian prison sentence Maycon Souto Dos Reis received after his Sept. 14, 2024 conviction for aggravated murder — ICE News Release, Aug. 2026
- 2 Days how long after ICE arrested Dos Reis at his own courthouse arraignment before Gov. Healey signed a law barring that kind of warrantless arrest — Fox News Digital; Mass.gov, Aug. 2026
- June 7, 2024 the date ICE says Dos Reis crossed the border illegally and was released into the country under the Biden administration — ICE News Release, Aug. 2026
- 0 criminal charges Dos Reis faces in the United States — his only prior American arrest was a driving-without-a-license charge that put him back in a courtroom ICE was watching — ICE News Release; New Bedford Guide, Aug. 2026
Maycon Souto Dos Reis walked into Westborough District Court on August 3, 2026, to answer for a charge of driving without a license. He walked out in ICE custody.
The 54-year-old Brazilian national had been living in Massachusetts for more than two years by then, ever since he crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally on June 7, 2024 — and was released into the country anyway, under Biden administration policy, according to ICE. What almost nobody in Massachusetts appears to have known in the meantime is that a Brazilian court convicted Dos Reis of aggravated murder three months later and sentenced him, in his absence, to 14 years and three months in prison.
Two days after ICE finally caught up with him, Governor Maura Healey (D-MA) signed a law making the exact kind of courthouse arrest that caught Dos Reis harder to carry out in Massachusetts going forward.
Dos Reis’s path to that Westborough courtroom began nowhere near Massachusetts. According to ICE, he crossed the border illegally on June 7, 2024, was apprehended, and released into the interior under Biden-era enforcement policy — a routine outcome for tens of thousands of border crossers that year. He made his way to Massachusetts and, as far as public records show, committed no U.S. crime for nearly two years.
Brazil moved faster than Washington did. On September 14, 2024 — three months after Dos Reis entered the United States — a Brazilian court convicted him of aggravated murder and issued an arrest warrant alongside his 14-year, three-month sentence. ICE’s release does not say when the underlying killing occurred or detail the facts behind the conviction; it states only that the warrant exists and that Dos Reis was already inside the United States by the time it was issued. For roughly two years, that foreign warrant sat unmatched to the man living under his own name in Massachusetts.
It took a traffic case to close the gap. Southborough police arrested Dos Reis on May 29, 2026, on a charge of operating a motor vehicle without a license — the kind of case that, absent his Brazilian record, would ordinarily end in a fine and nothing more. Instead, it put his name and fingerprints in front of ICE’s Boston field office for the first time.
ICE agents did not arrest Dos Reis at the traffic stop. They waited for his day in court. On August 3, 2026, Dos Reis appeared at Westborough District Court for his arraignment on the unlicensed-driving charge; ICE Boston officers and agents were there too, in what the agency called a targeted operation, and took him into custody as the hearing concluded.
Acting ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Boston Field Office Director David Wesling used the arrest to make a broader argument about how his agency’s targets get described publicly. “This is yet another example of what the media often characterizes as a non-criminal, when in reality, many of these individuals are murderers, sexual predators, gang members and more,” Wesling said in ICE’s release. “They simply do not have a criminal record in the United States.” DHS closed the release with language the department has attached to dozens of enforcement announcements this year: “If you come to our country illegally and break our laws, we will find you, arrest you, and you will never return. Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the United States.”
Dos Reis has not been charged with any crime in the United States. He remains in ICE custody pending the outcome of civil deportation proceedings — a separate legal track from the Brazilian criminal case that already produced his conviction and sentence.
THIS is why we end up making arrests in the community — our detainers for CRIMINAL ALIENS aren't honored. We COULD just meet them at the door and take custody of violent offenders in safe, controlled environments, but sanctuary policies across the nation require jails and prisons [to release them first].
The timing was almost exact. On August 5, 2026 — two days after agents took Dos Reis into custody inside a Massachusetts courthouse — Healey signed the PROTECT Act at a press conference in Chelsea. “The PROTECT Act is the strongest law in the country to protect people from ICE,” she said at the signing, “because no one should be afraid to send their child to school, seek medical care or fear reporting a crime or appearing in court.”
“Today we the people of Massachusetts are standing up and fighting back.”
Gov. Maura Healey (D-MA) — PROTECT Act signing, Aug. 5, 2026
The law does what its name promises for a specific set of places. It bars ICE from making warrantless civil immigration arrests inside courthouses, public schools, childcare centers, hospitals, and other health care facilities. It bans new so-called 287(g) agreements that deputize local police to act as ICE’s arresting agents. It limits what state and local agencies can hand ICE — custody status, release dates, non-public personal information — without a written request filed in advance. And it creates a new state civil-rights claim letting people sue government officials, ICE agents included, who violate their constitutional rights while making an arrest.
None of that touched Dos Reis’s case; he was already in ICE custody before the governor signed anything, and the law has no retroactive effect. What it does, going forward, is foreclose — without a judicial warrant — the exact tactic that caught him: a targeted operation inside a Massachusetts courthouse.
Dos Reis is not the only Brazilian murder fugitive ICE Boston has pulled out of Massachusetts this year. In a single month this spring, the field office arrested five foreign fugitives wanted for murder or homicide across New England — four of them in Massachusetts alone, including Kele Cristian Alves-Pereira, wanted for murder in Brazil since a February 2021 warrant, taken into custody during a targeted operation in Everett.
On March 13, ICE Boston arrested Kele Cristian Alves-Pereira, a criminal illegal alien and foreign fugitive from Brazil, during targeted operations in Everett, Mass. Authorities in Brazil issued a warrant for Alves-Pereira for the offense of murder on Feb. 22, 2021.
The friction between ICE and Massachusetts predates this month by more than a year. In August 2025, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told Boston radio host Howie Carr the agency would “flood the zone, especially in sanctuary jurisdictions,” after Boston Mayor Michelle Wu (D) declined to change the city’s policy on ICE detainer requests. Boston police rejected all of the roughly 57 detainer requests ICE filed with the department in 2025, citing the city’s Trust Act — an ordinance dating to 2014, amended in 2019, that bars Boston police from holding someone solely on a civil immigration detainer. Seven other Massachusetts municipalities — Amherst, Cambridge, Chelsea, Concord, Newton, Northampton, and Somerville — have adopted similar local ordinances.
Border czar Tom Homan made the same argument even more bluntly around the same period, telling Boston he was “bringing hell” to the city’s sanctuary jurisdictions:
That backdrop is why Healey, even while signing statewide restrictions on ICE, rejects the “sanctuary state” label DHS attaches to Massachusetts — her office describes the PROTECT Act as regulating where and how ICE can operate, not whether it can operate at all. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), who succeeded Kristi Noem in March 2026, has pushed the opposite framing: when local governments won’t cooperate with ICE, he has argued, the agency has no choice but to increase its visible presence in the community instead.
Dos Reis remains in ICE custody in Massachusetts as his removal case proceeds; no hearing date had been publicly reported as of this writing. If he is ultimately removed, he goes back to Brazil to serve the 14-year, three-month sentence a Brazilian court already handed down for aggravated murder — a conviction that, on ICE’s account, followed his arrival in the United States by exactly three months and preceded his arrest here by nearly two years.
Maycon Souto Dos Reis, 54, entered the United States illegally in June 2024 and was released under Biden-era policy. Three months later, a Brazilian court convicted him of aggravated murder and sentenced him to 14 years, three months. He lived in Massachusetts undetected by federal authorities until a May 2026 traffic charge in Southborough put his name in front of ICE, which arrested him August 3 during a targeted operation at his own courthouse arraignment in Westborough. Two days later, Gov. Maura Healey (D-MA) signed the PROTECT Act, barring that kind of warrantless courthouse arrest going forward. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) and Acting ICE ERO Boston Field Office Director David Wesling point to the arrest as evidence that Massachusetts’s sanctuary-style local ordinances, Boston’s Trust Act among them, shield people from scrutiny the public assumes doesn’t apply to them. Dos Reis faces no pending U.S. criminal charges and remains in ICE custody pending removal.
