Image source, Getty ImagesBySakshi Venkatraman
British right-wing political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos has apparently been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to the agency’s records.
Yiannopoulos, 41, a former editor of Breitbart News and a onetime employee of rapper Kanye West, appears to be held in Louisiana, according to a search of ICE’s inmate registry.
The self-styled provocateur has called himself the “most fabulous supervillain on the internet”. His critics call him a purveyor of hate speech.
Neither ICE nor Yiannopoulos has responded to the BBC’s request for comment, but his name and British origins appear in a search of detainees nationwide.
Yiannopoulos, who grew up in Kent in the south of England, currently resides in the US. The circumstances around his apparent detention are still unclear.
He was an early supporter of Donald Trump during the 2016 election, headlining an event called Gays for Trump during the Republican National Convention that year, and has backed Trump’s tighter immigration restrictions in the US.
But he had a bitter fallout with Trump’s movement. While Yiannopoulos continues to voice support for the Republican president’s agenda, he posted in March this year on X that Trump “has lost his way, bought off by foreign interests”.
Yiannopoulos has been widely criticised for his comments about transgender people, Muslims, Black Lives Matter, feminists and gay people, even though he himself identified as gay. Yiannopoulos now calls himself an “ex-gay”.
He has written columns titled “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” and “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?”
In 2017, Yiannopoulos was uninvited from speaking at CPAC, a US conservative conference that also hosted Trump, after footage emerged of him appearing to condone paedophilia. He also later apologised and resigned from Breitbart.
He denied the allegations, and said he had been speaking about his own experiences as a child.
Yiannopoulos was once regularly linked with the alt-right, a disparate group that is outspoken against so-called political correctness and feminism and which includes neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
He has said he does not consider himself part of the alt-right, although he has called it “energising and exciting”.
