Last fall, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents launched raids across the country, a violent confrontation occurred at a New York City immigration courthouse.
Video captured an ICE agent aggressively shoving the distraught wife of an Ecuadorian man to the ground after federal agents arrested her husband as he attended an asylum hearing. As the video went viral on social media, a DHS spokeswoman denounced the agent’s actions as “unacceptable and beneath the men and women of ICE” and said he would be “relieved of his duties.”
While the Trump administration was sharply criticized for the incident amid its sweeping deployment of immigration agents, Milo Yiannopoulos, the notorious far-right troll and early Donald Trump supporter, came to the defense of the immigration officers.
“Total legal immunity for ICE agents when they’re on duty,” he posted on X.
But on Friday, the very agency Yiannopoulos had been championing arrested him at New Orleans International Airport and held him in an ICE facility. The Department of Homeland Security alleged that Yiannopoulos, a British citizen, had overstayed a visa he entered on in 2019 and was issued a final removal order by an immigration judge on July 22 after skipping his hearing.
As if to make a show of his arrest, DHS posted a grainy and unflattering mug shot of the typically polished social media performer, calling him an “illegal alien” and declaring that “he chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws.”
Yiannopoulos’ arrest came as a shock to almost everyone. He had once toured college campuses around the country in support of Trump’s 2016 campaign, headlined a “Gays for Trump” RNC event, radicalized young people for MAGA, and wrote glowing pro-Trump pieces for Breitbart that laundered white nationalist views.
In recent years, as Trump and his administration ramped up immigration enforcement, Yiannopoulos cheered on the effort. “California needs ICE checkpoints 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,” he wrote last summer.
“We have got to deport millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters,” he added. “Justice system should be just ICE,” he later wrote.
Yiannopoulos even singled out the online menswear influencer Derek Guy after Guy mocked JD Vance’s suits, saying he had contacted “some friends in senior positions at ICE” and threatened to have him deported. “Enjoy Vietnam little buddy,” he taunted.
But in recent months, Yiannopoulos had begun to lose faith in the man he once pledged his loyalty to and built his social media empire around.
“I was there when the president came down the golden elevator. I campaigned for him for years,” Yiannopoulos posted in March. “But I am faithful to the mission, not the man. Trump has lost his way, bought off by foreign interests. Those of us who made him what he is have a duty now to unmake him. And we will.”
Yiannopoulos’ support for former MAGA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had a public falling-out with Trump, also infuriated his former pal and pro-Trump extremist Laura Loomer, who had trained her sights on him.
“I was the first person to report on the fact that Milo was in the U.S. illegally, where he incited violence against President Trump and worked for Marjorie Traitor Greene,” she bragged Friday on X, celebrating his arrest.
But the stunning turn of events for Yiannopoulos shows that despite his years of efforts radicalizing young men for Trump and viciously attacking the perceived enemies of MAGA, his usefulness to the movement eventually ran out. And he is hardly the first Trump ally to discover that loyalty is a one-way street. Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones went from some of Trump’s most influential MAGA media allies to “low-IQ” losers after criticizing Trump’s Iran War. Trump has also turned his fire on Fox News, attacking the MAGA network’s coverage when it strays from the administration’s preferred narrative.
Still, the irony of Yiannopoulos’ fate is impossible to miss. He spent years demanding that ICE stop making exceptions. He wanted checkpoints everywhere, on-the-spot deportations and an immigration system in which, as he put it, “nothing else matters” except deporting millions.
On Friday, he got his wish.
