Right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos deported from US to UK

What the report says

British right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos has been deported from the United States after being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to the BBC’s reporting and a statement from the Department of Homeland Security. DHS said the 41-year-old, a former Breitbart News editor and former political aide to rapper Kanye West, was sent back to the UK on Friday. The agency also said he had overstayed his visa after entering the US in 2019.

The BBC reported that Yiannopoulos was arrested on 27 August after arriving at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. He had grown up in Kent, in south-east England, and has long cultivated a high-profile, highly divisive public image. He has promoted hardline immigration views, while critics have accused him of spreading hate speech.

Yiannopoulos was an early supporter of Donald Trump in 2016, though he later became more critical of the president while still backing parts of his agenda. He has also worked for Kanye West and Marjorie Taylor Greene. The BBC noted that he has repeatedly drawn controversy for comments about transgender people, Muslims, Black Lives Matter, feminists and gay people.

The development is likely to be seen as notable because Yiannopoulos has been a prominent figure in US culture-war politics for nearly a decade, and because his removal came from a federal immigration enforcement action. Separately, conservative commentator Laura Loomer claimed credit for helping trigger the arrest, but that claim was not independently verified in the BBC report.