The Unvarnished Story of George Santos and His Mother

Hanging over the whole saga of George Santos, the congressman from New York who made up almost everything, is his mother, Fatima Devolder. One person who helped on a Santos political campaign remembers his voice getting shaky whenever he’d bring up his mother, even long after her 2016 death from cancer.

The two were very close, and family members remember her spoiling him as a child. “She was always making up excuses for what he did,” one relative said. Theirs was a boisterous home, a Queens basement apartment that sometimes hosted rats, but also happiness. Holidays were a big deal, featuring fried food from Fatima’s native Brazil. The TV played constantly, a very American condition. While Santos’s father Gercino was often the primary breadwinner, working as a house and building painter to support the family, Fatima cared for Santos and cleaned houses. She and Santos and Santos’s sister Tiffany were a tight unit, before and after Fatima’s relationship with Gercino ended. She was devoted to her offspring, posting on Facebook in Portuguese not long before she died, “I love my children, they are my everything ♥♥♥♥♥.”

There were also moments throughout Santos’s life when his mother would leave him for a spell in one place or another. He would stay with a relative while she went to Brazil. One time, when he was grown and she returned to New York, Fatima’s roommate remembered Santos frequently checking in on his mother, even though he lived some distance away. It seemed that Santos missed her.

At various points, they cohabitated, even when he was an adult. It could sometimes be tense. Another roommate remembers them fighting about everything you can imagine—cigarettes, money—and sometimes, Fatima would retreat to her bedroom and just cry. Santos would say horrible things to her, tell her to leave the house—“his” house, he’d say. This too would become a trait of his; he’d flip a switch, and threaten the nearest of friends or kin.

But there was often something pushing him back to his mother.

Santos’s sister, Tiffany, once left a “review” on his political Facebook page calling him a “son who dedicated his life to give our mother the most comfortable life when she was loosing [sic] her fight to cancer.” Santos’s care for Fatima is even stenciled into Queens public records. On Christmas Eve 2015, Santos appeared in housing court for failing to pay $2,250 in rent, and the complete audio recording of the proceeding reveals him saying matter-of-factly that his mother was staying with him, “for health issues.”

He talks not only about his deep feelings for his mother, but also his great pride in her life. Santos has called Fatima “the first female executive at a major financial institution.” He cites her prominence in local Republican politics, calling her “active with the party as a donor for over two decades.” He fondly remembers her leaving her “nine to five” to canvass for Rudy Giuliani, and bringing young Santos along. And he has clucked about her escape from the South Tower on 9⁄11, the way she got caught up in the “ash cloud.” There is good reason to believe that none of this is true.

City, state, and federal campaign finance databases show no evidence of political donations. She does not appear to have been a registered voter in New York, and her immigration records betray no sign that she was even a US citizen, though she worked for years to legalize her status and at one point had a green card. The 9⁄11 story is also questionable at best: In her own immigration paperwork, she claimed she was not in the United States that year. One entry from June 2001—just before the attacks—lists her current address as Niterói, Brazil. Santos continues to insist his mother was at Ground Zero, and perhaps she reentered or remained in the country in a way not reflected in the documents. Immigrants and employers sometimes tell tall tales on their applications about dates, details, and locations. But the son’s full claim about his mother’s 9⁄11 experience has further holes, including the campaign bio in which he says in successive sentences that Fatima was a financial executive and that she was “in her office in the South Tower” on the tragic day. People who knew her remember nothing about Wall Street jobs or Wall Street wealth.