By Owen Jacobs
Correspondent
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested Milo Yiannopoulos on Aug. 27, according to the New York Times. Yiannopoulos is a far-right British political commentator who has garnered controversy over his views on subjects such as immigration and feminism, according to the BBC.
ICE seized Yiannopoulos at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport in Louisiana. He was then briefly detained in an ICE facility and deported back to his home country, the UK, the following day, as per CNN.
Yiannopoulos legally arrived in the United States in May of 2019 but overstayed his visa in recent years, according to AP News.
According to an X Post made by the Department of Homeland Security, an immigration judge issued a mandate of removal on July 22, a little over a month before Yiannopoulos’s eventual deportation.
Yiannopoulos first gained a significant platform as the editor of Breitbart News from 2014 until 2017, when he resigned after major backlash against comments he made that seemed to excuse pedophilia, according to NPR.
These comments came from video clips posted by the conservative organization Reagan Battalion on X, and included Yiannopoulos defending relationships between adult men and boys as young as 13.
Yiannopoulos attempted to explain himself by characterizing his statements as improperly phrased, according to NPR.
Simon & Schuster, previously contracted to publish Yiannopoulos’ autobiography “Dangerous,” canceled the publication. The racial justice organization Color for Change led a petition with more than 50,000 signatures against the publishing house until Yiannopoulos’ book deal was canceled, according to The Guardian.
During his tenure at Breitbart News, Yiannopoulos gained a reputation for misogynistic and racist political stances. Twitter permanently banned Yiannopoulos in 2016 when he helped to ignite a hate campaign against “Ghostbusters” actress Leslie Jones, as per The Guardian.
In response to Yiannopoulos’ posts, Jones stated on X that she was “in a personal hell” and “so hurt.”
Milo Yiannopoulos’s controversial choices continued after he left Breitbart News. Yiannopoulos served as chief of staff for Kanye West at Yeezy; subsequently, he collaborated with and advised Mr. West on the rapper’s 2024 presidential campaign, according to the Washington Times. Both Yiannopoulos and West have been criticized in the past for espousing antisemitic beliefs.
Much of Yiannopoulos’s more recent notoriety stems from his past support of President Donald Trump’s forceful immigration policy, The New York Times reported. Last year, Yiannopoulos urged the deportation of “millions and millions of people” in an X post, claiming that “nothing else matters.”
After his own deportation, Yiannopoulos appeared to backtrack on his pro-ICE stance, stating in an interview last week with British commentator Piers Morgan that ICE detainment “hurts a lot more than it looks like on television” and expressed that he “didn’t really understand the physical reality of how institutionalised the brutality is in America,” according to a Piers Morgan Uncensored video.
Yiannopoulos also told Piers Morgan that he is “ashamed” of his former support for the Trump administration, according to The Hill, asserting that Laura Loomer, an informal adviser of Trump’s who claimed responsibility for reporting Yiannopoulos to ICE, is directing the president’s actions.
In a guest article for the British magazine The Spectator this week, Yiannopoulos described himself as a “persecuted human rights icon,” likening himself to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Along with commenting on politics through interviews and articles, Yiannopoulos regularly posts on X, a platform on which he has more than 800,000 followers.
