RIO DE JANEIRO, BRASIL - Last week, Payday’s story “Brazilian Federal Police Detain Melk, But Released Him After Lecture on Immigration Policies” went viral in Brasil, garnering over 3,000 likes and hundreds of replies and messages on Bluesky.
The piece described how I was detained at the Rio de Janeiro airport in late January after accidentally overstaying my visa by two weeks in 2024. I wrote about how I sat here nervously, fearing that I would be deported when the Brazilian federal police detained me. Rather than sending me home, the Brazilian federal police only asked me to pay a $27 fine.
I breathed a sigh of relief and said, “Thank God.” The Brazilian federal police officer immediately started joking with me, “What do you think, we were gonna throw you in jail? We’re not ICE, we’re Brazilians.”
The line “We’re not Ice, We’re Brazilians” went viral in Brasil with scores of Brazilians making memes like this one. For Brazilians, the line represented that Brasil was a more civilized democracy than the United States, which has deported at least 3,500 Brazilians in the last year alone.
Afterwards, the top Brazilian magazine Revista Forum picked up the story, making it even more viral in Brasil.
Eventually, Flavio Florencio, who has over 187,000 followers on TikTok, talked about my story on his channel. The story went even more viral, garnering over 175,000 views and 21,000 likes on TikTok.
Fascinated that over 21,000 people liked a video about my reporting in Brasil, I forwarded it to several of my friends in the United States, including editors at Payday Report. All of the people in the U.S. who received my forward were unable to view the video, receiving a message that read “This video isn’t available in your region or country.”
Over the past two days, I tried multiple times to send it to various people in the U.S., but they all received the same message: “This video isn’t available in your region or country.”
Finally, we discovered that TikToks made in Brasil are now banned under new rules implemented by the Trump Administration.
In January, TikTok, previously owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, was forced to be sold to a group of American investors as a result of a law passed with bipartisan support that required it to get rid of its Chinese owners. Now, TikTok in America is owned by one company, and TikTok elsewhere in the world is owned by their parent company, ByteDance.
As a result of regulations imposed by the Trump Administration, with bipartisan support from Democrats, TikToks made in other countries are no longer allowed to be viewed in the United States.
So while a TikTok about my reporting went viral in Brasil, garnering over 21,000 likes, no one in the United States was able to view it, including the more than 2 million Brazilian immigrants who live there. This is simply outrageous.
Brasil is the largest democracy that we have left in the Americas. It's wild that the Trump Administration is blocking Brazilian TikToks criticizing Trump policies from being viewed in the United States.
At a time when the United States is isolating itself from the rest of the world, it's more important that activists from Brasil and the United States be able to connect on TikTok, but they currently can't.
However, Payday Report is still headquartered in Pittsburgh and can continue publishing as long as we pay our bill. For the next month, we intend to fill dispatches from Brasil about what people are feeling.
We need your help and donations to tell the stories currently banned on TikTok.
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