NEW YORK—In a stunning end to the 40-year-old media personality’s rise to fame, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed Monday that Hilaria Baldwin had been deported to Spain.
Baldwin, who is set to star in a new reality series about her family’s home life, was reportedly handcuffed at the wrists and ankles as she boarded a repatriation flight at New York’s Kennedy Airport this morning. ICE officials told reporters they arrested the wellness influencer—who has often identified her birthplace as Mallorca, Spain—during a raid on her Greenwich Village home, placing her in a van with undocumented immigrants rounded up in other parts of the city.
“Hilaria Baldwin has publicly stated that she moved to the United States in 2003 to attend college, and because there is no record of her obtaining a visa, we believe she has been illegally living and working in this country ever since,” said ICE spokesperson Darrell Winthrop, adding that agents seized what they presumed was a fraudulent birth certificate identifying her as Hillary Lynn Hayward-Thomas and listing her birthplace as Boston. “Though in recent years she has begun posing as an American, she has on numerous earlier occasions admitted she is Spanish.”
“Even as she spoke to our agents, Baldwin kept switching back and forth between American and Spanish accents,” he continued. “She was clearly faking it.”
According to residents of the building where Baldwin lived, the yoga instructor and entrepreneur talked “nonstop” about her childhood home in Spain, her passion for flamenco, and the beloved, handed-down paella recipe she got from her abuela. They said that when they spoke to her in the lobby or elevator, she would often stumble over basic English words, and even seemed to have trouble pronouncing her own married last name.
Cynthia Rosenbaum, 74, told reporters she wasn’t surprised to learn about her neighbor’s alleged undocumented status. Living on the floor below Baldwin and her husband, the actor Alec Baldwin, Rosenbaum said she grew frustrated with the noise produced by the couple’s seven children, adding that anytime she raised the matter, Hilaria would respond exclusively in Spanish and act as though she couldn’t understand Rosenbaum’s English.
“It makes sense now—if Hilaria was here illegally, she must have thought, ‘The more anchor babies, the better,’” Rosenbaum said of Baldwin’s choice to have such a large family. “That marriage is clearly a sham. I can only imagine how she must have thrown herself at that man, hoping it would land her a green card. Why else would an attractive young woman like her want to be with someone that old?”
Following her arrest, New York Child Protective Services took Baldwin’s children—Carmen Gabriela, Rafael Thomas, Leonardo Ángel Charles, Romeo Alejandro David, Eduardo Pao Lucas, María Lucía Victoria, and Ilaria Catalina Irena—into custody. A representative for the agency confirmed they could not be left in the care of their father, who in 2021 shot and killed a woman in New Mexico.
Many immigrant advocates criticized the deportation, seizing upon the example to show that not even wealth and fame could protect an undocumented person from ICE.
“It’s incredibly sad, because who knows what Hilaria was running from when she came to this country in the first place?” said Carolyn Tran, a Florida immigration attorney. “Back home in Spain, Hilaria faces an uncertain future. Do they have TLC reality shows over there? Do they have Instagram? Yoga?”
“In many ways, this echoes the case of Rachel Dolezal, the renowned NAACP leader who was deported to Nigeria,” she added.
A transcript of Baldwin’s deportation hearing revealed that she tried desperately to convince authorities to let her remain in the United States. But the judge in charge of the proceeding sternly ignored her entreaties, even when she stood up and exclaimed, “I have—how do you say in English?—U.S. citizenship!”
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