The deportation of obnoxious provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos back to Britain is a funny and ironic story. But the reaction to this and other deportation cases suggests that some of the most ardent supporters of mass deportations start to flinch when the consequences of President Donald Trump’s policies affect someone they like.
If you’ve never heard of Yiannopoulos, I envy you. In 2017, he resigned as an editor for the conservative online site Breitbart News under fire on social media for appearing to condone statutory rape, criticizing “this arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent.” More recently, he raised the possibility that conservative activist Charlie Kirk faked his own death. Never mind that Kirk was shot in a public setting and any decent human being who saw the video longs to unsee it.
Nearly a decade ago, Yiannopoulos said he had entered the United States on an O-1 visa, reserved for those who have “extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics.” (Insert eye roll here.) Those visas allow an immigrant to stay for up to three years, with an opportunity to apply for extensions. According to the Department of Homeland Security, he “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws. Yiannopoulos was issued a final order of removal by an Immigration Judge on July 22, after failing to show up for his immigration hearing.”
Yiannopoulos is one of the loudest and most loathsome proponents of Trump’s immigration policies. His deportation as an illegal immigrant reaches such high levels of irony that the news should come with an FDA warning.
But even better, or worse, was right-wing media personality Mike Cernovich’s argument after the arrest but before the deportation, “Milo Yiannopoulos is as spiritually American as it can get. I hope this misunderstanding is corrected!” Whether Cernovich realizes it or not, he’s echoing former president President Barack Obama’s argument that the “dreamers” — immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally as children — were “Americans in their heart, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper.”
The administration’s dragnet also strayed onto Trump turf when it swept up the fiancée of John Gannon, a Texas businessman who said he voted for Trump, but who was shocked when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested the Venezuelan-born Yasmin Suarez Reyes, who had an asylum case pending. She has a valid work permit and a legal immigration case pending, according to news reports, but her underlying permission to be in the U.S., under the visa waiver program, has expired.
Gannon told CBS News that if he could speak to Trump, he would say, “Go after the criminals. We’re all for that. But leave the mom and pops and the kids alone. Man, he’s destroying families.”
But that’s not what Trump ran on in 2024, was it? Shortly after the election, NBC News’s Kristen Welker asked the president-elect directly, “Is it your plan to deport everyone who is here illegally over the next four years?” Trump answered, “I think you have to do it.”
Now that project is well underway, and some staunch MAGA supporters don’t like seeing the deportation of certain individuals who have violated the country’s immigration laws deported.
It’s safe to say that most people, of any political persuasion except on the looniest left, would agree that immigration enforcement authorities ought to have certain deportation priorities. The case for deporting gang members, drug dealers, sex offenders and other criminals who endanger others is self-evident. The case for deporting an otherwise law-abiding illegal entrant or visa overstayer is less clear. At a minimum, there seems to be little return on investment for putting resources into deporting — as the administration has — a married couple who run a landscaping business and have lived in the country for three decades, or a U.S.-born toddler sent to Haiti because the president unilaterally ended the kid’s parents’ temporary protected status.
The good news is this is not the odious policy of family separation. The bad news is we’re sending a U.S.-born child to the chaos of gang-ridden Haiti and basically saying, “Good luck, kid.”
There are some glimmers of potential improvement in the administration’s immigration enforcement policies. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin recently pointed out that certain migrants can apply for permanent residence — for which he is getting grief from some MAGA corners. Maybe Mullin needs to look for more friends of MAGA influencers who have overstayed their visas; apparently everyone turns into an immigration squish the moment you move to deport someone they know personally.
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