Brazil's Supreme Court has ordered the arrest of Eduardo Bolsonaro, a former federal congressman who has lived in Texas since early 2025 and who holds a U.S. green card issued in July 2026. The order, signed on October 8 by Justice Alexandre de Moraes, instructs federal police to detain him if he returns to Brazil, cancels every Brazilian passport issued to him, and starts the clock on a sentence he was given in June.
Because he is outside the country, the practical question the order raises is not one for Brazilian police. It is whether the United States would hand him over — and no extradition request has been filed.
What he was convicted of
Eduardo Bolsonaro, 42, was convicted of coercion in the course of legal proceedings. The conduct at issue was his lobbying of the Trump administration, while his father's coup trial was under way, to impose sanctions on Brazilian officials and to raise tariffs on Brazilian exports.
The sentence is just over four years — four years and two months, to be served initially in a semi-open regime, according to O Rio Times; the Associated Press reported it as four years. He was also given 50 day-fines of two minimum wages each, roughly 160,000 reais, and his political rights are suspended while he serves the term. He cannot run for office until eight years after it ends.
His appeal was rejected on September 18, and the conviction became final on October 3, O Rio Times reported. Moraes also ordered his name entered in Brazil's National Imprisonment Monitoring Bank. Eduardo had already lost his seat in Congress because of his long absence from Brazil, as well as his post as a federal police investigator.
"The defendant cannot benefit from his own wrongdoing by fleeing the national territory to an unknown location," Moraes wrote in the ruling, according to the AP.
Eduardo Bolsonaro has said he is being politically persecuted and that he was never validly notified of the case. His lawyer did not respond to an AP request for comment.
Why extradition is a long shot
The United States and Brazil have had an extradition treaty since 1961, but two Brazilian law professors told the AP that it is unlikely to apply here.
Raphael Vieira da Fonseca Rocha, of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, said any request would have to be approved by the Trump administration, which he considers improbable, and suggested the Supreme Court may not pursue one at all — reading the passport cancellation as a pressure measure rather than a step toward extradition. João Pedro Padua, of Fluminense Federal University, said coercion during judicial proceedings does not appear on the treaty's list of extraditable offenses, a list generally read as exhaustive. Padua also noted that Eduardo was in the United States when he committed the acts he was convicted over.
That is the structural fact underneath the order: a Brazilian court has imposed a penalty whose enforcement depends on a decision in Washington, which has not been asked to make it.
The timing
The ruling landed less than three weeks before Brazil's October 25 presidential runoff, in which President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva faces Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, Eduardo's brother, who led the first round. Eduardo has been the family's main channel to the Trump administration; on May 26 he brought Flávio to the Oval Office to meet President Trump.
Their father, Jair Bolsonaro, was sentenced last year to 27 years for the attempted coup. Members of the Trump administration have not commented publicly on Eduardo's conviction, the AP reported.
Reporting from the Associated Press, O Rio Times and the Eurasia Review.
