British political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, a vocal supporter of US President Donald Trump, was apparently detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to the agency’s records.
Yiannopoulos, 41, a former editor of the right-wing US website Breitbart and employee of rapper Kanye West, appears to be held in Louisiana, according to a search of ICE’s inmate registry.
The self-styled provocateur has called himself the “most fabulous supervillain on the internet”. His critics call him a purveyor of hate speech.
Neither ICE nor Yiannopoulos have responded to the BBC’s request for comment, but his name and British origins appear in a search of detainees nationwide.
Yiannopoulos, who grew up in Kent in the south of England, currently resides in the US. The circumstances around his apparent detention are still unclear.
He was an early supporter of Trump during the 2016 election, headlining an event called Gays for Trump during the Republican National Convention that year, and has backed Trump’s tighter immigration restrictions in the US.
“Total legal immunity for ICE agents when they’re on duty,” he posted on X last year.
Yiannopoulos has been widely criticised for his comments about transgender people, Muslims, Black Lives Matter, feminists and gay people, even though he himself identified as gay. Yiannopoulos now calls himself an “ex-gay”.
He has written columns titled “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” and “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?
In 2017, Yiannopoulos was uninvited from speaking at CPAC, a US conservative conference that also hosted Trump, after footage emerged of him appearing to condone paedophilia. He also later apologised and resigned from Breitbart.
He denied the allegations, and said he had been speaking about his own experiences as a child.
Yiannopoulos is regularly associated with the alt-right, a disparate nationalistic group that is outspoken against so-called political correctness and feminism and includes neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
He says he does not consider himself part of the alt-right, although he has called it “energising and exciting”.
