Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing media figure who previously served as Kanye West’s chief of staff and now works as his publicist, has reportedly been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
According to sources cited by TMZ, the British provocateur was taken into custody at an airport in Louisiana. Inmate records reportedly show he is being held at a detention facility in the state.
It is not yet clear why Yiannopoulos was traveling to Louisiana, though West is due to take the stage at the Superdome in New Orleans on Friday.
Yiannopoulos, who built his public profile as a conservative political commentator, has long voiced support for tougher immigration policies, including broad deportation measures.
In 2017, he said he was living in the United States on an O-1 nonimmigrant visa, a category reserved for foreign nationals with “extraordinary ability” in fields such as science, the arts, education, business or athletics, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services policy manual.
Our News Outlet has reached out to both Yiannopoulos and ICE seeking comment.
Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing influencer and former Kanye West chief of staff who now represents him as publicist, has reportedly been detained by ICE; pictured in 2024
West is seen with Yiannopoulos in Beverly Hills in November 2022, the same month the pair visited Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago alongside Nick Fuentes
O-1 visas, which require sponsorship by an ‘agent’ or employer, can also be given to individuals of ‘extraordinary achievement’ in movies and TV.
Yiannopoulos enjoys a longstanding association with West and acted as director of political operations on his 2024 US presidential campaign.
In 2022, during his time as West’s political honcho, he helped arrange the rapper’s explosively controversial Mar-a-Lago summit with Donald Trump and the self-described ‘white identitarian’ streaming star Nick Fuentes.
Yiannopoulous has since dramatically fallen out with Fuentes, whom he now relentlessly derides on X, formerly known as Twitter.
In 2017, he exchanged vows in Hawaii with a black man whom he publicly referred to only as ‘John,’ otherwise carefully concealing his identity.
As such, it remains unconfirmed whether Yiannopoulos became eligible to obtain American citizenship or a green card via marriage to a US national.
Yiannopoulos has characterized himself as ‘ex-gay’ since 2021, and has commenced divorce proceedings with his husband.
His reported ICE woes come after his client, West, was banned from Yiannopoulos’ native Britain over the antisemitic diatribes that torpedoed his career, including praise for Hitler and a vow to go ‘death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.’
Sources claim the British firebrand was taken into custody at an airport in Louisiana, with inmate records indicating he is now at a detention center there, via TMZ; pictured 2017
West took out a full-page ad apologizing for the comments in the Wall Street Journal this January, three months before he was prohibited from entering the UK.
He was scheduled to a headline a music festival at Finsbury Park in London that was called off altogether after his appearance became impossible.
West has also seen planned concerts canceled in Poland and France this year as a result of the continuing backlash to his past tirades about Jews.
He was set to perform at the Gazprom Arena in St Petersburg in October, which would have made him the highest-profile western artist to play Russia since the outbreak of the Ukraine War, but those shows were also scrapped amid blowback.
However he has been able to mount concerts in America, as well as in Mexico, Turkey and such post-Soviet countries as Georgia and Kazakhstan.
In his Wall Street Journal ad, West blamed his antisemitic remarks on his infamous 2002 car crash, which he claimed left him with brain damage that went ‘unnoticed’ and led to the development of his subsequently diagnosed bipolar disorder.
