US deports far-right provocateur and Kanye spokesman Milo Yiannopoulos

US Immigration officials on Saturday said controversial British far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos was back to the United Kingdom after he was arrested on Thursday in New Orleans, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Yiannopoulos has long been an internet personality for his frequent, provocative public positions criticizing feminism, Islam and immigrants, and is a close associate of several prominent promoters of antisemitic conspiracy theories. He has also himself cheered on US President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown and mass deportations.

Immigration officials announced Friday that Yiannopoulos was arrested at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport and accuse him of overstaying after entering the United States legally in May 2019 through New York City. An immigration judge issued a final order of removal on July 22 after Yiannopoulos failed to show up for his immigration hearing, a DHS spokesperson wrote in an email.

"He chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation's laws," a spokesperson for DHS wrote in an emailed statement.

ICE's online detainee locator did not say where Yiannopoulos was being held, but directed family and legal representatives to the agency's office in Alexandria, Louisiana, a deportation hub for international flights.

Representatives of Yiannopoulos do not respond to a request for comment. It is unclear whether he has legal representation.

Jewish MAGA 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 Candace Owens' podcast. Both Greene and Owens are anti-Israel figures who have become critics of Trump and the MAGA movement.

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

Yiannopoulos rose to fame in the early 2010s as an incendiary writer for the conservative website Breitbart News. He resigned from the company in 2017 after a video of him endorsing pedophilia resurfaced online. He later apologized for the remarks and said he himself was a victim of sexual assault as a minor.

Controversy around Yiannopoulos ballooned in 2017 when he carried out what he called his "Troll Academy Tour" across college campuses nationwide. Fights broke out when some students protested Yiannopoulos's appearances and accused him of hate speech, while others celebrated him as a champion of free speech. Around that time, Buzzfeed reported on Yiannopoulos's cozy relationships with self-proclaimed white nationalists.

He has a long history of inflammatory comments, and has flirted with Holocaust denial while claiming Jewish ancestry. The Anti-Defamation League labeled 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."

In recent years, Yiannopoulos continued to work in the orbit of right-wing activism, first interning for Greene.

He subsequently ran the short-lived 2024 presidential campaign for Kanye West, who has been beset by controversy of his own following antisemitic comments that the rapper has since apologized for. Yiannopoulos has since served as West's spokesman.

Yiannopoulos also took credit for organizing a dinner in 2022 between Donald Trump, West and white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes, which was widely condemned by both major US political parties. At the time, Yiannopoulos said that he organized 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 behavior comes back to bite you in the end."

More recently, when West took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year to apologize 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 likable, human or frightening as Japs."

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