Milo Yiannopoulos got deported, flew back to the United Kingdom, and then posted a picture of his bank account online. The screenshot showed a Wells Fargo Premier account holding $4,923,630.64. “Just for the sake of argument,” he wrote.
The 41-year-old British commentator put it up Wednesday, days after Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him at a New Orleans airport and flew him out of the country. The figure looked like a joke about the Trump Platinum Card, a proposed luxury visa that would cost $5 million and let foreign nationals stay in the United States for up to 270 days a year without paying U.S. taxes on foreign income. His balance came up just short.
For years, he cheered ICE on
Before ICE came for him, Yiannopoulos was one of its loudest fans online. In June 2025 he wrote on X: “We have got to deport millions and millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters.” That same month, June 2025, he pushed for immigration checkpoints across California “at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections and government buildings, with on the spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally.”
By September he was calling for “total legal immunity for ICE agents when they’re on duty.” He also posted, “Justice system should be just ICE.” In December he wrote that punishing Somalis “indiscriminately, as a group, and deporting them all” was the only way the administration would convince voters it was serious. Those posts came from a former Breitbart editor who had spent Trump’s second term begging the government to go to extremes on immigration.
“You got me”
Piers Morgan lined those posts up on his show and asked Yiannopoulos to defend them. “So there you are, aggressively promoting ICE being very aggressive and demanding that millions of people be deported,” the host said. “People say, Milo, you’ve been hoisted by your own petard.”
Yiannopoulos threw his hands in the air. “I don’t have a word to say. You got me,” he said, then laughed awkwardly.
“I mean they’re doing what you told them to do. Deport millions of people,” Morgan said. Yiannopoulos answered that they were not doing it lawfully. When Morgan reminded him he had called for Somalis to be removed indiscriminately, Yiannopoulos said he was “obviously exaggerating there” and that “ICE is supposed to deport criminals.” Pressed on why his posts never singled out Somali criminals, he claimed, without evidence, that most Somalis in Minnesota are tied to “fraud.”
From true believer to “ashamed”
On the same program, Yiannopoulos disowned the man he once helped put in office. He said the “promise and hope and joy and the anticipation of Trump 2016” had collapsed “into this ugly, warmongering, whole mentally ill heap of crazy with some of the most unstable and lunatic people, seemingly directing the president’s actions.”
“If I had any clue that anything remotely like this was even possible, I would never have got involved in supporting Trump in the first place and I’m very ashamed that I did,” he said.
He also questioned Trump’s claim to be deporting the “worst of the worst.” If ICE were clearing out “the people who rape, kill, murder, and sell drugs” and a few extra people got swept up, he said, nobody would have much to say. “But they’re not doing that.”
Chained at the hands and feet
Yiannopoulos described the arrest as brutal. Agents chained his hands and feet, he said, and treated him the way television treats gang members. “I didn’t really understand the physical reality of how institutionalized the brutality is in America,” he said. “Everybody arrested is like an MS-13 gang member, and it hurts a lot more than it looks like on television.”
He called the process “humiliating,” “disorientating” and “physically degrading,” and said he had never been so scared. “It was frightening, and I don’t think I’ve ever been frightened like that before,” he said. He told Morgan he used to be “a little bit blase” when people talked about their trauma and now understands it, and would not wish it on anyone.
He called the removal “faster, rougher and nastier than perhaps any deportation,” saying he was denied food for 24 hours and shuttled between detention and correctional facilities every few hours. He was promised medical care and a phone call that never came, he said, and two ICE agents recognized him and refused to take part. “This was not a normal, lawful process,” he said.
His side of the paperwork
The Department of Homeland Security said Yiannopoulos entered the country legally in 2019, overstayed his visa, and skipped a July immigration hearing that led an immigration judge to order him removed on July 22. Yiannopoulos calls that account “a lie from top to bottom.”
He says he married an American in 2017 and filed to switch from a visa to a green card, which was then canceled without his knowledge. The hearing notices, he says, went to a Florida address he left nearly a decade ago, so he never knew a hearing existed. “The government knew I wasn’t there,” he said. “The government knew I wasn’t getting these things. It knew that I had no idea what was happening, and they did this anyway.”
White House border czar Tom Homan rejected any special treatment. “He was ordered to appear in immigration court. He didn’t show up. The judge ordered him deported,” Homan said. “It’s that simple.”
Yiannopoulos plans to appeal, arguing the government “maliciously and deviously” engineered his removal to make an example of him. “I have a family. I have a home. I have employees. I have two very gorgeous little Bengal cats,” he said. “I’m not going to allow a politically motivated weekend of hell to rip my whole life away from me.”
DHS used his mugshot as an ad
The government did not treat the arrest quietly. DHS posted his mugshot and used it to promote the administration’s self-deportation program, which offers people in the country illegally $3,000 and a free flight home if they leave voluntarily. “Being in detention is a choice,” the agency wrote. It said Yiannopoulos “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws.”
Laura Loomer takes credit
Laura Loomer, a close Trump ally, said she was the one who turned him in. CNN reported there is no indication any report from Loomer was connected to the arrest, and Tom Homan said it did not matter either way. “I was the first person to report on the fact that Milo was in the US illegally where he incited violence against President Trump and worked for Marjorie Traitor Greene,” she wrote on X, using her nickname for former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. “When Milo called for me to be assassinated, I reported him to ICE and FBI.” She called his arrest a great day for America.
The two go back years. Yiannopoulos once worked as communications director on Loomer’s first congressional campaign, and said he quickly saw “there was something very, very wrong with her.” Asked what role she played in his deportation, he said she “is more of a danger to themselves than to others.” He added that he does not think she is well. “And whenever the Laura Loomer show comes crashing down, as I’m sure it will any moment, I think she’s going to need a lot of prayer.”
Still working for Kanye West
Two days after landing in the U.K., Yiannopoulos was back at work for Kanye West, the rapper who legally changed his name to Ye. He manages Ye’s lawyers, a job he says he can do from anywhere. Asked how his boss reacted, he said Ye and his wife “were just worried that I was OK.”
Yiannopoulos worked on Ye’s long-shot 2024 presidential bid, has run the rapper’s legal team, and worked for his Yeezy fashion brand. He has also claimed credit for arranging the 2022 dinner between Trump, Ye and white supremacist Nick Fuentes. ICE detained him in New Orleans the same week Ye performed at the Caesars Superdome, though it is not clear he was there for the show.
He first rose to prominence as a Breitbart editor and a central figure in the 2014 Gamergate harassment campaign. He resigned from the site in 2017 after video surfaced of him appearing to condone sexual relationships between adult men and boys, which cost him a book deal and a speaking slot at CPAC. He later said he was abused as a teenager and did not advocate illegal behavior. Now he is trying to fight his way back into a country he once wanted sealed shut, one appeal at a time.
