Milo Yiannopoulos, right-wing troll with links to popular antisemitic figures, detained by ICE

JTA – Far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, a close associate of Ye, Candace Owens, and other past and present promoters of antisemitic conspiracy theories, has been detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, federal officials announced on Friday. 

Yiannopoulos, a British citizen who himself has cheered on the Trump administration’s mass deportations, was arrested in New Orleans on Thursday. 

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Yiannopoulos had entered the United States legally in 2019 but “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws”. Yiannopoulos missed an immigration hearing and was issued a final order of removal in July, according to DHS, and will remain in ICE custody “pending removal”. 

Jewish MAGA (Make America Great Again) firebrand Laura Loomer, an influential figure in the Trump administration, took credit for the arrest on social media. 

In a series of posts on X, Loomer blasted Yiannopoulos for his past internship with former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and his appearances on right-wing commentator Owens’ podcast. Both Greene and Owens are anti-Israel figures who have become critics of President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. 

“Milo is going to be deported back to the United Kingdom [UK] where he can live among the Muslims he has recently chosen to embrace,” Loomer wrote. “Today is a great day for America.” Late on Friday, Loomer claimed he was “on an airplane back to the UK”. 

Yiannopoulos, a former editor at Breitbart News and one-time beacon of the burgeoning alt-right movement, has a long history of inflammatory comments, and has flirted with Holocaust denial while claiming Jewish ancestry. The Anti-Defamation League labelled him as an “alt-right apologist” and a “misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, transphobic troll who is extremely good at getting people to pay attention to him”. 

His ascension through the conservative movement was abruptly halted in 2017 after he appeared to endorse paedophilia in a video. But Yiannopoulos bounced back after developing a relationship with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. After Ye began to gain notoriety in 2022 for promoting extreme antisemitic rhetoric, Yiannopoulos joined his long-shot 2024 presidential campaign as chief of staff. 

Yiannopoulos also took credit for organising a dinner in 2022 between Trump, Ye, and white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes, which was widely condemned by both parties. At the time, Yiannopoulos said that he organised it “to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly neglected, ignored, abused the people who love him the most, the people who put him in office, and that kind of behaviour comes back to bite you in the end”. 

More recently, when Ye took out a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year to apologise for his antisemitism, Yiannopoulos shared the ad on X – a day after he had posted, “The problem with these kamikaze Jews is they aren’t remotely as likeable, human, or frightening as Japs.” 

Yiannopoulos has said that he is Jewish through his maternal grandmother, though he is a practising Roman Catholic, and refutes claims of being racist or antisemitic. 

In 2019, Yiannopoulos told the Los Angeles Jewish Journal that he is a “paid-up Zionist” who would advocate for a Jewish “super-state” in the Middle East. That interview took place in Berlin, the day after an event where Yiannopoulos spoke to members of the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland party. 

Two years earlier, Yiannopoulos had rallied against the City University of New York for hosting Linda Sarsour, a promoter of the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement against Israel, as a commencement speaker. 

In an April 2026 interview with Owens, who herself has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, Yiannopoulos compared the Israeli government to Nazi Germany, and said that “Netanyahu’s Israel will have eclipsed Hitler’s Germany by many, many counts, morally speaking, probably by the numbers, too”. 

He said the Netanyahu administration “has gone so far that they’re now willing to sacrifice their own citizens in order to increase their borders”. 

“Where do I remember that from? Uh, could it be the word ‘Lebensraum’?” he said, referring to the key tenet of Nazi ideology that meant conquering more land for the Aryan race to settle. “Could it be a country that did exactly that?”