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 one time 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” and advocated for stricter US immigration controls. 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.

He has previously cheered on ICE raids, last year calling for “total legal immunity for ICE agents when they’re on duty”.

He wrote on social media in 2025: “We have got to deport millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters.”

Yiannopoulos also advocated “on the spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally” on social media.

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.

Laura Loomer, a far-right commentator and Trump ally who has feuded with Yiannopoulos, took credit for his arrest by ICE, claiming on X on Friday night that his flight back to the UK had already departed.

“This subversive foreign agent is already out of the United States and DHS tells me he’s NEVER allowed to come back to the United States ever again,” she wrote.

In 2017, he was disinvited from speaking at CPAC, a US conservative conference that also hosted Trump, after footage emerged of Yiannopoulos 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 political correctness and feminism, and which includes neo-Nazis and white supremacists among its ranks.

He has said he did not consider himself part of the alt-right, although he has called it “energising and exciting”.