Right-wing influencer Milo Yiannopoulos, who served as Kanye West‘s chief of staff and is now his publicist, has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The British firebrand was taken into custody at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport on Thursday and is now in a detention center in Louisiana.
ICE shared an official statement with the Daily Mail on Friday afternoon saying Yiannopoulos had entered the country in May 2019 and ‘overstayed his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws’
‘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 ICE statement continued. ‘He will remain in ICE custody pending removal.’
‘DHS reversed the horrendous Biden-era policy that allowed aliens in our country illegally to jet around our country,’ the statement further read. ‘Under President Trump, DHS will no longer tolerate this. 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.’
Right-wing influencer Milo Yiannopoulos, who used to be Kanye West’s chief of staff and is now his publicist, has been detained by ICE; pictured 2024
West is pictured with Yiannopoulos in Beverly Hills in November 2022, the same month they visited Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago with Nick fuentes in tow
aIronically, since his rise to fame as a political commentator, Yiannopoulos has been a staunch advocate of immigration restriction and mass deportations.
He said in 2017 that he was in America on an O-1 nonimmigrant visa, which is granted to aliens with an ‘extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics,’ according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services policy manual.
The Daily Mail has attempted to reach out to Yiannopoulos for further comment.
O-1 visas, which require sponsorship by an ‘agent’ or employer, can also be given to individuals of ‘extraordinary achievement’ in movies and TV.
Yiannopoulos enjoys a longstanding association with West and acted as director of political operations on his 2024 US presidential campaign.
In 2022, during his time as West’s political honcho, he helped arrange the rapper’s explosively controversial Mar-a-Lago summit with Donald Trump and the self-described ‘white identitarian’ streaming star Nick Fuentes.
Yiannopoulous has since dramatically fallen out with Fuentes, whom he now relentlessly derides on X, formerly known as Twitter.
In 2017, he exchanged vows in Hawaii with a black man whom he publicly referred to only as ‘John,’ otherwise carefully concealing his identity.
As such, it remains unconfirmed whether Yiannopoulos became eligible to obtain American citizenship or a green card via marriage to a US national.
Yiannopoulos has characterized himself as ‘ex-gay’ since 2021, and has commenced divorce proceedings with his husband.
During the second Trump presidency, Yiannopoulous has been vocal in urging ICE to step up its expulsion of immigrants who are in the US illegally.
‘There is one concrete thing we must insist on this administration delivering,’ he declared in a post on X last June. ‘It matters a lot more than debts measured in imaginary money. We have got to deport millions and millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters.’
Sources claim the British firebrand was taken into custody at an airport in Louisiana, with inmate records indicating he is now at a detention center there, via TMZ; pictured 2017
Yiannopoulos, who was allegedly seized in the New Orleans area, now faces a final order of removal, per US officials and government records obtained by CBS
Three days later, he wrote: ‘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.’
His own reported ICE woes come after his client, West, was banned from Yiannopoulos’ native Britain over the antisemitic diatribes that torpedoed his career, including praise for Hitler and a vow to go ‘death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.’
West took out a full-page ad apologizing for the comments in the Wall Street Journal this January, three months before he was prohibited from entering the UK.
He had been scheduled to a headline a music festival at Finsbury Park in London that was called off altogether after his appearance there became impossible.
His own reported ICE woes come after his client, West, was banned from Yiannopoulos’ native Britain over the antisemitic diatribes that torpedoed his career
West has also seen planned concerts canceled in Poland and France this year as a result of the continuing backlash to his tirades about Jews, as well as a past embrace of Nazi iconography so extravagant that he released a single called Heil Hitler and sold merchandise splashed with swastikas.
He was set to perform at the Gazprom Arena in St Petersburg in October, which would have made him the highest-profile western artist to play Russia since the outbreak of the Ukraine War, but those shows were also scrapped amid blowback.
However he has been able to stage concerts in America, as well as in Mexico, Turkey and such post-Soviet countries as Georgia and Kazakhstan.
In his Wall Street Journal ad, West blamed his antisemitic remarks on his infamous 2002 car crash, which he claimed left him with brain damage that went ‘unnoticed’ and led to the development of his subsequently diagnosed bipolar disorder.
