Milo Yiannopoulos, the British commentator who spent years championing hard-line immigration enforcement in the United States, has been deported to the United Kingdom after being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Department of Homeland Security said Saturday that he was flown out of the country on Friday. ICE had detained him two days earlier at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport in Kenner, Louisiana, PBS NewsHour reported.
According to DHS, Yiannopoulos entered the United States legally on May 14, 2019, through New York City, then stayed after his authorized period expired. The agency said he chose to overstay his welcome in violation of the country's laws. An immigration judge issued a final order of removal on July 22 after he failed to appear at his immigration hearing.
Before the deportation was confirmed, ICE's online detainee locator did not list where he was being held and directed family members and lawyers to the agency's office in Alexandria, Louisiana, a hub for international removal flights.
A DHS spokesperson framed the case as part of a broader push, saying the administration is working to ensure that people in the country illegally can only fly if the flight takes them out of it, ABC News reported.
Yiannopoulos first drew wide attention a decade ago as an editor at Breitbart News. He resigned in 2017 after the surfacing of a video in which he appeared to endorse sexual relationships between adult men and underage boys, comments for which he later apologized, NPR reported. His campus speaking tour that year drew protests over what critics called hate speech.
In recent years he worked briefly as an intern for former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and on Kanye West's presidential campaign. Conservative activist Laura Loomer, who has feuded publicly with him for years, welcomed the arrest on social media and said she had been the first to report that he was in the country illegally.