Milo Yiannopoulos deported from US after ICE detention in New Orleans

Far-right British media provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos has been deported from the US after being detained on Thursday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in New Orleans in connection with what the agency said was expired authorization to be in the country and a deportation order.

Yiannopoulos’s deportation occurred on Friday, said a statement on Saturday from a spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.

The DHS spokesperson’s statement did not say where Yiannopoulos had been deported to. But, citing “two senior US sources”, the UK’s Telegraph newspaper reported that Yiannopoulos had been flown back to Britain.

A DHS spokesperson on Friday said that Yiannopoulos, 41, had been arrested by ICE on Thursday at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans international airport. The spokesperson said Yiannopoulos “legally entered the country” in May 2019 through New York City but then “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws”.

The spokesperson said that Yiannopoulos was issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge on 22 July “after failing to show up for his immigration hearing”.

“He will remain in ICE custody pending removal,” the spokesperson added. “This administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport.”

Yiannopoulos – who has previously been a vocal supporter of ICE and immediate deportations for anyone who can’t prove US residency – was believed to have been arrested while heading to a concert by rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West.

West performed at New Orleans’s Caesars Superdome on Friday. In 2022, Yiannopoulos worked on West’s short-lived 2024 White House campaign, and his social media account suggests he was working for a company of the rapper.

Yiannopoulos, a former editor of the conservative media outlet Breitbart News, previously served as an intern for the former US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. He eventually became locked into a feud with fellow far-right commentator Laura Loomer, a Donald Trump administration ally who claimed on Friday that she had reported Yiannopoulos to ICE over his immigration status.

At the peak of his influence, Yiannopoulos was offered a speaking slot at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in 2017 after he had been supportive of Trump during his run for his first presidency.

He fell out of favor in conservative circles after the publication of a video in which he condoned sexual relations with boys as young as 13.

Yiannopoulos claimed that his experiences as a victim of teenage sexual abuse gave him license to comment on the subject. He soon resigned as a senior editor at Breitbart.

Yiannopoulos was also banned from Twitter, now called X, in 2016 for directing racist and misogynistic tweets against a Black actor in a Ghostbusters remake. His account was reinstated to the platform in 2022 after it was acquired and renamed by multibillionaire Elon Musk.

A little more than a year before his detention by ICE, a social media post from Yiannopoulos called on immigration checkpoints to be set up at California “supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersection and government buildings, with on the spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally”.