Far-right Donald Trump supporter Milo Yiannopoulos, who was deported from the US this week, has said he didn't understand how 'brutal' America was until he was arrested.
Yiannopoulos was returned to the UK on Friday after being arrested at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport in Louisiana on Thursday, having failed to appear at an immigration hearing. He has referred to himself as 'the most fabulous supervillain on the internet' and has championed alt-right talking points on feminism, Islam and immigrants. He has been especially supportive of Trump's immigration crackdown, despite being an immigrant himself.
Arrest and Deportation
After his arrest and deportation, Yiannopoulos said: 'If I had any clue that anything remotely like this was even possible, I would never have gotten involved in supporting Trump in the first place, and I'm very ashamed that I did.'
In his first interview since being deported, Yiannopoulos told Piers Morgan Uncensored: 'I don't think I've ever been frightened like that before. I didn't really understand the physical reality of how institutionalised the brutality is in America. The manner in which they arrest you. They put you in manacles, your hands, your feet, chained together. Everybody is arrested like an MS-13 gang member. And it hurts a lot more than it looks like on television.'
Detention Experience
He added: 'I was put from a detention facility to a correctional facility, every three hours, they were sort of trying to keep ahead of my lawyers… no-one would tell me anything. I mean, I know it's designed to be like that, but it was humiliating and it was disorientating all the rest of it, it was physically degrading. It was frightening.'
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said on Saturday: 'Yiannopoulos legally entered the country on May 14 2019, through New York City, New York. 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. He will remain in ICE custody pending removal.'
Background
In the early 2010s, Yiannopoulos was recruited to the Breitbart website by Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon. He resigned from the company in 2017 after a video of him endorsing paedophilia resurfaced online, and later apologised for the remarks and said he had been a victim of sexual assault as a minor.
