Far-right British provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos arrested by US immigration enforcement

U.S. Immigration officials arrested controversial British far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos on Thursday in New Orleans, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Immigration officials announced on Friday that Yiannopoulos was arrested at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport and accused 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 doesn’t say where Yiannopoulos is being held but directs family and legal representatives to the agency’s office in Alexandria, Louisiana, a deportation hub for international flights.

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

The British national has most recently worked for the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, who is scheduled to perform in New Orleans on Friday evening.

Yiannopoulos is a well-known champion of conservative causes and has frequently taken provocative public positions criticizing feminism, Islam and immigrants. He has been especially supportive of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown.

“Zero immigration for the next 20 years. No ifs, no buts,” Yiannopoulos wrote on the social platform X last year.

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.

Yiannopoulos' arrest Friday comes amid a nationwide uptick in detentions as part of Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Far-right conservative activist Laura Loomer swiftly took to social media to applaud Yiannopoulos’ arrest after years of public feuding between the two personalities.

“I was the first person to report on the fact that Milo was in the US illegally where he incited violence against President Trump and worked for Marjorie Traitor Greene,” Loomer wrote on X.

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' appearances and accused him of hate speech, while others celebrated him as a champion of free speech. Around that time, Buzzfeed reported on Yiannopoulos' cozy relationships with self-proclaimed white nationalists.

In recent years, Yiannopoulos continued to work in the orbit of conservative activism. In 2022, he was an intern for former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, according to the Washington Post. He subsequently ran the short-lived 2024 presidential campaign for Ye. Most recently, Yiannopolous has worked as a spokesperson for Ye, who has been beset by controversy of his own following antisemitic comments that the rapper has since apologized for.

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This story has been corrected to say Milo Yiannopoulos entered the U.S. legally in 2019, not illegally.

FILE - Media personality and author Milo Yiannopoulos appears during an interview in New York on July 18, 2017, to promote his autobiography, "Dangerous." (AP Photo/John Carucci, File)

FILE - Milo Yiannopoulos pauses while speaking during a news conference in New York, Feb. 21, 2017. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)

FILE - Milo Yiannopoulos speaks during a news conference in New York, Feb. 21, 2017. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)

FILE - Activist Milo Yiannopoulos speaks during a rally outside of the Baltimore hotel where the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops are holding its Fall General Assembly meeting in Baltimore, Nov. 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Friday said the U.S. has entered an agreement with Venezuela to take control of 65 billion barrels of the South American country’s oil reserves.

Trump in a social media post announced the agreement he said was negotiated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodriguez.

“The United States of America has just entered into an Agreement with the Country of Venezuela on, THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!” Trump wrote.

The Venezuelan government’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The announcement of the deal comes nearly nine months after the U.S. military at Trump’s direction carried out an operation to capture Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and spirit him to the United States to face federal narcoterrorism and drug trafficking charges.

Trump faces mounting pressure to address high gas prices as the war in Iran on Friday reached a six-month milestone with no conclusion in sight. The U.S. has tapped its strategic petroleum reserves, which in early August fell below 300 million barrels, down by more than 100 million barrels since the start of 2026.

The U.S.-Israel war against Iran has led to a dramatic slowdown of Gulf oil moving through the Strait of Hormuz, which about 20% of the world petroleum passed through prior to the conflict.

The average price of gas in the U.S. stood at about $4.09 a gallon on Friday, according to AAA. The average price was $3.21 at the same time last year.

Trump in his social media post Friday evening alluded to the Venezuela deal being part of a private partnership. The White House did not immediately reply to a request for comment about the private sector partners involved in the deal, and details on how the arrangement would work were not provided.

Persuading big American oil companies to return the region could face headwinds given and decades of badly damaged infrastructure.

Days after the ouster of Maduro, Trump gathered oil executives at the White House and called on them to rush back into Venezuela. Executives expressed interest in the opportunity but there was also a measure of caution given their past experience in the country.

Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil, the largest U.S. oil company, said at that moment he saw the country as “un-investable.”

But Trump has insisted that his administration has brought a measure of stability to Venezuela.

He has argued that Venezuela stole U.S. oil when former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s moved decades ago to nationalize hundreds of foreign-owned assets, including those owned by American oil companies.

Rodriguez, in one of her early moves after taking power, signed a law that opens the nation’s oil sector to privatization and reversed a bedrock tenet of the self-proclaimed socialist movement that had ruled the country for more than two decades.

Rubio said on X that the agreement would usher in $100 billion in private investment into Venezuela and lead to lower gas prices in the United States.

“This deal is a huge win for both the American and Venezuelan people,” Rubio posted.

Venezuela has one of the largest oil reserves in the world, with an estimated 303 billion barrels of crude oil in the ground. That’s about 17% of the world’s supply, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Unlike other parts of the world, where geologists have to search for untapped oil, the reserves under Venezuela’s soil are largely mapped and known, experts say. But because of dilapidated infrastructure, the country only produces about 1% of the world’s oil.

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Regina Garcia Cano in Caracas contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump waves after arriving off Air Force One, Friday, Aug. 28, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews, Md. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)