Milo Yiannopoulos Put ICE’s Hotline On A Screen And Told Students To Purge Their Local Illegals, Now He Is Reportedly In An ICE Detention Center In Louisiana

Milo Yiannopoulos has reportedly been detained by ICE in Louisiana, according to TMZ, which cited inmate records showing him held at an ICE detention center and sources saying he was taken into custody at an airport.

 

The reason for the detention has not been disclosed. ICE has not commented. As of publication, TMZ is the only outlet reporting it, and no charge, removal order, or immigration violation has been made public, so treat the specifics as unconfirmed until the agency or his representatives say more. What is known is why he was likely in the state. Yiannopoulos spent close to two years as Ye’s chief of staff and served as director of political operations for the YE24 presidential campaign before the two parted ways in 2024. Ye is scheduled to perform Friday night at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans.
The reason this landed the way it did is his own record.

 

Yiannopoulos is British. He was born in England in October 1984 under the name Milo Hanrahan and later took his Greek grandmother’s surname. He is not an American citizen and never has been. In February 2017, at the press conference where he announced his resignation from Breitbart, he said he lives in the United States on an O-1 visa, the category reserved for people with extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics.

 

He also spent years turning immigration enforcement into a stage act. At the University of New Mexico in January 2018, he wore a police vest and displayed the ICE tip hotline number on a giant screen behind him with the instruction “Purge your local illegals.” He used the same slogan on an LED billboard at another campus appearance, with the ICE phone number printed alongside it. Ahead of his canceled 2017 event at UC Berkeley, a professor said reliable sources indicated he planned to publicly name undocumented students at the school. In 2018, he staged a photo shoot at a mock Western Wall, wearing a kippah with ICE printed on it and placing a prayer note asking for speedy deportations.
The rest of the record is long and documented.

 

Twitter permanently banned him in July 2016 for inciting targeted abuse of Leslie Jones during the release of the “Ghostbusters” reboot. Jones, who is Black, was flooded with racist and sexist messages, including images comparing her to apes and fake tweets fabricated to look like they came from her own account. She left the platform, writing that she was in a personal hell and asking Twitter to do more. The Associated Press, Reuters, and BuzzFeed all reported that Yiannopoulos led or directed much of the campaign. Twitter’s suspension email said he was removed for repeated violations of the rules prohibiting participating in or inciting targeted abuse of individuals. He called the ban cowardly and said he was targeted for being a gay conservative. Facebook banned him in 2019.

 

In late 2017, BuzzFeed News published leaked emails from his time at Breitbart showing he solicited story ideas and editing suggestions from white nationalists, including Devin Saucier, an editor at American Renaissance. He resigned from Breitbart in February 2017 and lost his Simon and Schuster book deal in the same stretch, after video surfaced of him describing sexual relationships between adult men and boys as young as 13 as something that happens, in his words, perfectly consensually.
In March 2019, Australia banned him from entering the country over his response to the Christchurch mosque massacre, which killed 51 people. He had written on Facebook that attacks like it happen because the establishment panders to and mollycoddles extremist leftism and what he called barbaric, alien religious cultures. Immigration Minister David Coleman said the comments were appalling and fomented hatred and division. The ban came a week after Coleman had approved his visa over the objection of the Home Affairs department, which had warned he might fail the country’s character test. Labor MP Tony Burke said the department already had enough evidence to bar him and that the tours for the world’s hate speakers had to stop.

 

Louisiana is a difficult place to be in ICE custody right now. Detention there has stretched to years for some people. In March 2024, there were 412 people nationwide held in immigration detention for more than a year. By March 2026, the last time ICE released detention statistics, that number had grown to 2,220. Louisiana’s federal courts have been flooded with habeas petitions from detainees arguing they are being held unlawfully, more than 1,200 in the first five months of 2026 alone, compared with 291 across the entire five years from 2020 through 2024. Nationally, ICE held 65,765 people in detention as of July 11, and roughly 70 percent of them had no criminal conviction.
Whether Yiannopoulos remains in that system for any length of time, and on what basis he was taken into it, is not yet known.