Markus Perez Echeimberg spent years painting his face like the Joker before UFC matches, a small ritual that turned him into one of the more recognizable characters to pass through the promotion’s roster.
These days, the 36 year old Brazilian known to fans as Markus “Maluko” is not preparing for a walkout. He is sitting inside the Mojave Detention Center in California City, California, more than a month into an ICE detention that started, of all places, on a plane.
According to his family, agents detained Markus on July 13 as he was boarding a flight out of Salt Lake City headed back to Florida, where he lives and trains at American Top Team. He had gone to Utah to see relatives ahead of a scheduled bout at Karate Combat 62 in Miami on July 24, and by his family’s account he was already cutting weight for that match while he traveled.
Instead of making championship rounds, he made calls from custody, including one to his mother back in São Paulo shortly after he was pulled off the aircraft.
The story circulating among athletes is that ICE agents came aboard after Markus was already seated, asked for his documents, handcuffed him and walked him off the plane. From there his month became a tour of federal holding: several days in an airport detention center, a stretch in a Salt Lake City jail, a transfer to a facility in Iowa, then back to Salt Lake City for two days before he finally landed at Mojave, roughly two hours from Los Angeles.
On August 14, a judge denied his defense’s request for bail. His family says they’re now searching for a new lawyer after the one previously handling the case stepped away, and they’ve started raising money to cover legal bills and daily costs, since Markus has no income while he sits in detention.
The paperwork trail is where things get complicated. Markus had held work visas before but ran into renewal trouble in 2024. He’d applied for an EB1 visa, the category built for people with “special abilities,” which athletes sometimes lean on as a step toward a Green Card
That’s the version of events that reached Renato Moicano, and the UFC lightweight did not stay quiet about it. Moicano brought up a clip of Markus at a political event, arms raised, chanting Donald Trump’s name like a rallying cry.
Moicano’s reaction was somewhere between disbelief and exasperation. “There’s a video of Marcos Malucco speaking like this: ‘Trump, you need to save this country.'”
He couldn’t get through the memory without laughing at the irony of it now. “I was his…” Moicano said, catching himself mid-sentence as he explained that he had once shared the same enthusiasm for Trump before reconsidering his position after seeing what happened to Markus. “He just lost his status,” Moicano said, referring to Markus’s expired visa. “I think you only have six months [to resolve it]. He passed six months, and they’re not going to give him anything.”
Moicano himself has become increasingly outspoken about his political views. Following his win over Benoît Saint Denis in France, the UFC lightweight delivered an anti-democracy speech and encouraged viewers to read the work of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the German-American philosopher known for his right-wing libertarian views and criticism of democracy.
Moicano comentando sobre a prisão do Markus Maluco e explicando por que todo idólatra de político é um completo idiota pic.twitter.com/vYu68RoIpY
— Kayron (@Kyron_NineIota) September 13, 2026
Moicano’s larger point is that cheering for a politician from a distance is a poor substitute for understanding how that politician’s policies might actually land on you. He wasn’t attacking Markus so much as the instinct to worship a leader without reading the fine print, a habit he suggested belongs to people who don’t think it through.
Just found out through Moicano that Maluko was making videos in support of Trump screaming “Trump you gotta win to save the country” and now has been in an ice camp for 6 months because his visa expired https://t.co/qDpw1BWmJz pic.twitter.com/2l7ey4nLI1
— 💔 (@uhvaimorre) September 13, 2026
Markus’s own résumé inside the cage tells the story of a journeyman who never stopped chasing bigger nights even after the UFC let him go. He competed in the UFC from 2017 to 2021, finishing 2-5 with wins over James Bochnovic and Anthony Hernandez, and a loss on his record to Dricus Du Plessis, who later became UFC middleweight champion.
Before the UFC, he’d already won an LFA title. After his UFC run ended, he kept moving through Cage Warriors, Gamebred Boxing, Gamebred Bareknuckle MMA, Karate Combat, where he’d built a five match stretch and was gearing up for another appearance when his trip to Utah interrupted everything.
