British right-wing political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos has been deported from the United States after being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Yiannopoulos, 41, a former editor of Breitbart News and onetime political aide to rapper Kanye West, was deported on Friday, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Yiannopoulos, “an illegal alien from the United Kingdom” had been sent “back to his home country”, a DHS spokesperson said in a statement given to the BBC.
The self-styled provocateur has called himself the “most fabulous supervillain on the internet”. His critics call him a purveyor of hate speech.
Yiannopoulos, who grew up in Kent in the south of England, was arrested on 27 August after arriving at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.
He flew into the US in May 2019 and “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws”, the DHS said.
Yiannopoulos was an early supporter of Donald Trump during the 2016 election, headlining an event that year called Gays for Trump during the Republican National Convention.
The commentator has since become a critic of the US president, but still voices support for his agenda. He wrote on X in March this year that Trump had “lost his way, bought off by foreign interests”.
Yiannopoulos has courted controversy with his comments on transgender people, Muslims, Black Lives Matter, feminists and gay people, even though he himself identified as gay. He now calls himself an “ex-gay”.
In 2020, he assisted West in the rapper’s unsuccessful bid to become president. He also worked for Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former Republican congresswoman who fell out with Trump and became a fierce critic before resigning from office.