Milo Yiannopoulos, the British far-right commentator who publicly championed President Trump's immigration crackdown, was arrested by federal agents and deported to the United Kingdom after living in the United States illegally for years.
According to NPR, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency announced the arrest in a post on X.
"On August 27, ICE arrested Milo Yiannopoulos, an illegal alien from the United Kingdom, at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport," the agency said in a post on X.
ICE said Yiannopoulos had entered the country legally on May 14, 2019, through New York City, but then overstayed his visa. "Yiannopoulos was issued a final order of removal by an Immigration Judge on July 22, after failing to show up for his immigration hearing," the agency said in its statement.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed to NPR in a separate statement that Yiannopoulos was deported back to the UK on Friday.
Yiannopoulos rose to prominence through provocative statements criticizing political correctness, feminism, and Islam. He also drew criticism for alleged ties to white nationalists. He broke from the profile of other hard-right figures by identifying as a gay man.
He first gained wider attention roughly two decades ago as a writer for the conservative website Breitbart News. He resigned in 2017 after a video surfaced where he appeared to endorse sexual relationships between adult men and younger boys, for which he later apologized. That same year, he embarked on a tour of college campuses that was marked by protests over what some attendees and critics called hate speech.
Among his more controversial public positions, he equated feminism with cancer, said the US has "a Muslim problem," and created a scholarship exclusively for young white men.
His political work included an internship with then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2022 and a role helping run the short-lived presidential campaign of Ye, formerly Kanye West.
Despite his vocal support for Trump's immigration policies, his relationship with the broader MAGA movement had soured in recent years, largely due to his association with Greene. Greene resigned from Congress earlier this year after a falling out with Trump.
On the subject of deportations, Yiannopoulos had been an outspoken advocate. "We have got to deport millions and millions and millions of people," he posted on X last summer. "Without that, nothing else matters."
