SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
Washington: British far-right agitator Milo Yiannopoulos has been deported from the United States to the United Kingdom after being detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement – an agency he had vigorously defended online.
The Department of Homeland Security said Yiannopoulos “chose to overstay his welcome” after arriving in the US legally in 2019.
“Yiannopoulos was issued a final order of removal by an Immigration Judge on July 22, after failing to show up for his immigration hearing,” DHS said on Friday (US time).
The department posted Yiannopoulos’ mugshot on X and said he was arrested on Thursday at New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong International Airport. A spokesperson said on Saturday that he had now been deported.
Entertainment website TMZ, which was first to report the arrest, suggested Yiannopoulos may have been in Louisiana with rapper Ye – better known as Kanye West – with whom the British commentator has sometimes worked. Ye is scheduled to perform in New Orleans on Friday night, local time.
Yeezy, West’s apparel company, was contacted for comment.
Yiannopoulos came to prominence as an editor at the far-right US website Breitbart News, where his targets typically included feminism and Islam.
He corresponded and associated with various far-right figures and white nationalists and was banned from numerous social media platforms.
Yiannopoulos was sacked from Breitbart and ostracised from the conservative mainstream after he defended sexual relationships between adult men and teenage boys as young as 13 in certain circumstances.
In 2019, he was denied a visa to enter Australia for a speaking tour after he said that the Christchurch mosque massacre occurred because the establishment “panders to and mollycoddles extremist leftism and barbaric, alien religious cultures”.
The 2019 mass shootings in Christchurch killed 51 people, all Muslim worshippers. They were perpetrated by an Australian white supremacist, Brenton Tarrant.
In recent years, Yiannopoulos reportedly worked as Ye’s chief of staff while the rapper embraced Nazism, antisemitism and Holocaust denial. Earlier this year, Ye apologised and expressed regret over his actions, attributing them to his bipolar disorder.
The British provocateur also rebranded himself as an “ex-gay” – though he said he didn’t like the term – and floated the idea of opening a “reparative therapy” clinic in Florida.
Last year, Yiannopoulos expressed support on social media for ICE and the deportations being ordered by the Trump administration.
“California needs ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections and government buildings, with on-the-spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally,” he posted from his X account in June 2025.
He also queried whether one could masturbate in public if they found themselves observing an ICE raid.
But Yiannopoulos is also part of a fracture in the MAGA movement between those who have remained loyal to Trump and those, like him and far-right podcaster Candace Owens, who have broken with the president over support for Israel.
On a podcast with Owens a year ago, Yiannopoulos called Israel a “rogue and wicked state” whose end “must come”. Trump was “bought, paid for, owned and operated” by Israel, he alleged. [He also claims to have Jewish ancestry.]
Laura Loomer, a far-right internet personality and MAGA activist who is on the other side of that divide, took credit for Yiannopoulos’ arrest.
Loomer, who has 1.9 million followers on X and enjoys the ear of President Donald Trump, has been posting about the Brit’s immigration status for more than a year.
“When Milo called for me to be assassinated, I reported him to ICE and the FBI,” she said on X on Friday. “I told you all that Milo was an illegal alien.”
Loomer’s influence and apparent success in having senior personnel removed from the Trump administration have led to the popularisation of the term “getting Loomer-ed” when someone she opposes is dismissed from their post.
Yiannopoulos briefly worked as an intern for former GOP congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who fell out with Trump and is now part of talks to create a new right-wing movement with broadcaster Tucker Carlson.
With Reuters
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.
