British right-wing political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and is awaiting deportation.

Yiannopoulos, 41, a former editor of Breitbart News and onetime employee of rapper Kanye West, appears to be held in Louisiana, according to ICE’s inmate registry.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said he “was issued a final order of removal by an Immigration Judge on July 22, after failing to show up for his immigration hearing”, and will remain in custody pending deportation.

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 the airport in New Orleans.

He flew into the US in May 2019 and “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws”, said DHS.

The DHS statement referred to him as “an illegal alien from the United Kingdom”.

The BBC has asked the British embassy in Washington for comment. Yiannopoulos did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

“Being in detention is a choice,” the DHS statement continued, calling on migrants who are in the US illegally to “self-deport now”.

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.

But he soon fell out with the movement. Yiannopoulos still voices support for the Republican president’s agenda. But he posted in March this year on X that Trump “has 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”.

He has written columns titled “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” and “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?”

He has also cheered on ICE raids, writing on X last year: “Total legal immunity for ICE agents when they’re on duty.”

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

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

In 2017, he was uninvited 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.

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