British right-wing political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and is awaiting deportation.
Yiannopoulos, 41, a former editor of Breitbart News and onetime political aide to rapper Kanye West, appears to be held in Louisiana, according to ICE’s inmate registry.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said he “was issued a final order of removal by an Immigration Judge on July 22, after failing to show up for his immigration hearing”, and will remain in custody pending deportation.
The self-styled provocateur has called himself the “most fabulous supervillain on the internet”. His critics call him a purveyor of hate speech.
Yiannopoulos, who grew up in Kent in the south of England, was arrested on 27 August after arriving at the airport in New Orleans.
He flew into the US in May 2019 and “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws”, said DHS.
The DHS statement referred to him as “an illegal alien from the United Kingdom”.
The BBC has asked the British embassy in Washington for comment. Yiannopoulos did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.
“Being in detention is a choice,” the DHS statement continued, calling on migrants who are in the US illegally to “self-deport now”.
Yiannopoulos was an early supporter of Donald Trump during the 2016 election, headlining an event that year called Gays for Trump during the Republican National Convention.
Yiannopoulos has become a critic of Trump, but still voices support for the Republican president’s agenda. He posted in March this year on X that Trump “has lost his way, bought off by foreign interests”.
Yiannopoulos has courted controversy with his comments on transgender people, Muslims, Black Lives Matter, feminists and gay people, even though he himself identified as gay. He now calls himself an “ex-gay”.
In 2020, he assisted Kanye West in the rapper’s bid to become president. He also worked for Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former Republican congresswoman who fell out with Trump and became a fierce critic before resigning from office.
