Berliner Tageszeitung - Milo Yiannopoulos held by ICE after missing immigration hearing

Right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, a British citizen who previously served as Kanye West's chief of staff and now acts as his publicist, has been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Yiannopoulos was taken into custody at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport on Thursday and transferred to a detention centre in Louisiana.

ICE said on Friday that he entered the United States in May 2019 and remained beyond his authorised stay. The agency said an immigration judge issued a final removal order on July 22 after he failed to attend his hearing, and that he would remain in custody pending removal.

Yiannopoulos said in 2017 that he held an O-1 non-immigrant visa, which can be issued to people with extraordinary ability in fields including science, the arts, education, business and athletics, or extraordinary achievement in film and television. Such visas require an employer or agent sponsor.

He married a man in Hawaii in 2017, but it has not been established whether the marriage gave him eligibility for permanent residence or citizenship. Since 2021, he has described himself as ex-gay and has begun divorce proceedings.

Yiannopoulos directed political operations for West's proposed 2024 presidential campaign. In November 2022 he helped arrange a meeting at Mar-a-Lago involving West, Donald Trump and white nationalist broadcaster Nick Fuentes. Yiannopoulos and Fuentes later fell out publicly.

During Trump's second presidency, Yiannopoulos urged the administration to deport millions of people and advocated widespread immigration checkpoints in California. ICE said the administration would no longer allow people living in the country unlawfully to use domestic flights except to leave voluntarily.

Yiannopoulos's client West has faced international restrictions and concert cancellations following antisemitic statements and his use of Nazi imagery. Britain barred West from entering the country, preventing a planned Finsbury Park festival appearance, and proposed concerts in Poland, France and Russia were also cancelled. West apologised in a Wall Street Journal advertisement in January and attributed his conduct to brain damage from a 2002 car crash and later-diagnosed bipolar disorder.

A. Bogdanow--BTZ