Milo Yiannopoulos, a British national known for his near-constant reinventions as a vizier within far-right American politics for more than a decade, has been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Louisiana, according to the department’s records.
While it’s not clear which detention facility Yiannopoulos is currently being held in, the ICE directory instructs any family or legal representatives to contact the Enforcement and Removal Office in Alexandria, Louisiana, a processing center for the central part of the state, about 200 miles from New Orleans.
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson from the US Department of Homeland Security says that Yiannopoulos legally entered the country through New York City in May 2019. “He chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws,” the statement says. “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 DHS spokesperson says Yiannopoulos was detained on Thursday, August 27 and that “he will remain in ICE custody pending removal.”
TMZ first broke the news of Yiannopoulos’ detention. He has previously lived and worked in the US, allegedly on an O-1 visa, which is for individuals with extraordinary abilities in the arts, sciences, and other areas, including journalism—but he has never been a US citizen.
Yiannopoulos got his start in US politics at the right-wing website Breitbart, where he worked from 2014 to 2017. He left the job after his remarks about sexual intercourse between adults and young adolescent boys, which he said could be “perfectly consensual,” resulted in a backlash. He has dipped in and out of right-wing circles for years, and in 2022 claimed to have arranged an infamous 2022 dinner with Kanye West, white nationalist Nick Fuentes, and Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago “to make Trump’s life miserable.”
Yiannopoulos married his long-term boyfriend in Hawaii in 2017 but in 2021 claimed he had become heterosexual and Roman Catholic, and announced plans to open a gay conversion therapy facility in Florida. He went on to work with Fuentes as well as former US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Yiannopoulos also serves as spokesman for Kanye West, who is scheduled to perform at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans on Friday night as part of his 2026 tour. The longtime provocateur joined West’s theoretical 2024 presidential campaign in late 2022, but walked away days after the rapper espoused Nazi beliefs and praised Adolf Hitler on conspiracist Alex Jones’ Infowars livestream. The two continually reunited and split over the following years, with Yiannopoulis claiming in a series of X posts in 2024 that West was addicted to nitrous oxide.
Throughout his evolution as a MAGA figure, Yiannopoulos has rarely shied away from highly public battles with enemies and rivals. Among the most outspoken is the Islamophobic conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who on Friday pinned a post on X announcing his detention by ICE—and appeared to take partial credit for it.
“I was the first person to report on the fact that Milo was in the US illegally where he incited violence against President Trump and worked for Marjorie Traitor Greene,” Loomer wrote. “Milo is going to be deported back to the UK where he can live among the Muslims he has recently chosen to embrace. Today is a great day for America.”
Last summer, Yiannopoulos endorsed a hardline anti-immigration stance on his own X account. “There is one concrete thing we must insist on this administration delivering,” he wrote. “We have got to deport millions and millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters.”
Update, Friday August 28 at 5 pm: This story was updated to include a statement sent to WIRED by the US Department of Homeland Security.