In the repression following the São Paulo Revolt of 1924, in which some labor leaders took part, Passos was jailed in the 4th Auxiliary Police Bureau and deported to the penal colony of Clevelândia, on the border with French Guiana.

Under the new "Miscreant Law", which imposed serious restrictions to freedom of press and assembly, Passos was arrested in a pro-Sacco and Vanzetti meeting and remained forty days jailed at a Cambuci police station.

[4] In that context, Passos was elected for the Civil Construction Workers Union's executive committee, serving as second-secretary from October to December and then as first-secretary from January to July 1920.

[8] Right before the PCB's foundation, in March 1922, the Civil Construction Workers Union published a manifesto reproaching the Soviet government, claiming that in Russia "some members of the Communist Party, enthroned in power, exercise the dictatorship in the name of the proletariat" and denouncing that "all left-wing revolutionaries, especially anarchist combatants, are being persecuted, imprisoned and killed".

After the tenentista revolt of Copacana Fort in July 1922, O Trabalho, the Civil Construction Workers Union journal in which Passos was an active collaborator, was closed by the repression like many other anarchist and labor periodicals.

Rio de Janeiro police arrested Passos and other anarchists who gathered the night that the São Paulo revolt broke out.

[12] Domingos Passos remained twenty days jailed at the Central Police Station before being sent to the prison ship Campos, anchored at the Guanabara Bay.

[13][14] Passos was transferred to Comandante Vasconcellos and deported to the penal colony of Clevelândia do Norte, on the border with French Guiana, alongside other anarchist activists, rebel soldiers, beggars, procurers, and thieves.

[17] On May Day 1925, Passos, Domingos Brás, other deportees, and local settlers gathered to sing "The Internationale" on the banks of the Oyapock River.

On another occasion, Passos gathered eight deportees at the Epitácio Pessoa Square to protest their treatment, but were soon silenced by the penal colony director and armed soldiers.

He was accompanied by his comrades Domingos Brás, Pedro Augusto Motta, Manuel Ferreira Gomes, José Batista da Silva, and Tomás Deslits Borghe.

In Saint George, they were free of privation and mistreatment but after a month without jobs, they found themselves in desperate financial straits without means to pay for transport to Belém do Pará.

The diseases contracted in the jungle forced the group to seek medicine in Caiena, where they found shelter offered by a local créole.

[21] However, disputes between anarchists and communists weakened direct action unionism in Rio de Janeiro and reformists gained strength.

The anarchist journal A Plebe attributed the indifference facing that conference to the "amorphous organizations that have no other horizon than the narrow circle of its own corporations" and the "associations enslaved under the rule of Bolshevik politicking".

His prison was justified by the "Miscreant Law", approved under the government of Washington Luís, which imposed serious restrictions to freedom of press and assembly, typifying the crimes of "deviate workers from the establishments in which they are employed through threats and embarrassment" and "causing or provoking ceasing or suspension of work through threats or violence to impose on workers or employers an increase or decrease of services or wages".

He found shelter in a local village and wrote his anarchist comrades of São Paulo asking for money, which was delivered by a trusted emissary.