Milo Yiannopoulos posts nearly $5 million bank balance online

Milo Yiannopoulos, the far-right commentator deported from the United States on Aug. 28, posted a screenshot of a Wells Fargo account holding $4,923,630.64 on Wednesday, a day after telling a British interviewer he was ashamed he had ever backed President Donald Trump.

The 41-year-old British commentator shared the image from the United Kingdom with the caption "Just for the sake of argument," according to the Daily Beast. He appeared to be joking that the balance left him just short of the $5 million cost of the proposed Trump Platinum Card.

The Trump Platinum Card is a proposed luxury visa concept that would cost foreign nationals $5 million and allow them to stay in the United States for up to 270 days a year without paying U.S. taxes on foreign income. Yiannopoulos, a British national, was removed for overstaying the visa he held after entering the country in 2019.

Ashamed of his support

Yiannopoulos made the about-face on "Piers Morgan Uncensored," in an interview that aired Tuesday. He told the British broadcaster that being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement had changed how he views Trump and the mass-deportation agenda he had spent years promoting, a conclusion he said he reached only after experiencing enforcement firsthand.

If I had any clue that anything remotely like this was even possible, I would never have got involved in supporting Trump in the first place, and I'm very ashamed that I did.

He described the arrest as physically punishing. Yiannopoulos said ICE agents put him in manacles, chaining his hands and feet. "Everybody arrested is like an MS-13 gang member, and it hurts a lot more than it looks like on television," he said.

Speaking to Morgan, he said he had been "swarmed" by 15 agents and that, for the first time, he knew what it felt like to be "really, really terrified." He recounted weeping "like an old woman for an hour" after falling down a flight of stairs.

The commentator, who once declared on X that the justice system should be "just ICE," told Morgan the detention was "humiliating and disorientating" and "physically degrading."

What he once demanded

For years Yiannopoulos was among the loudest public advocates for the deportation campaign that eventually removed him. On June 5, 2025, he posted on X: "We have got to deport millions and millions and millions of people. Without that, nothing else matters."

In a June 2025 post, he called for "ICE checkpoints" across California at supermarkets and gas stations and demanded "on the spot deportation" for anyone who could not prove their legal status during a stop by federal agents. Another post carried an image reading "Papers, please."

The Department of Homeland Security said Yiannopoulos entered the country legally on May 14, 2019, through New York, then overstayed his visa. ICE arrested him on Aug. 27 at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, where he had been working for the rapper Ye. Ye performed in New Orleans the following night, and no source has established why Yiannopoulos was in the city. An immigration judge had issued a final order of removal on July 22 after he failed to appear at a hearing.

Yiannopoulos disputes that he knew about the hearing. He told Morgan that immigration officials had sent notices to an outdated Florida address, and that the government had canceled his work permit "without telling me" at some point over the past year. He also complained that authorities moved him between facilities during the process.

He also said he was married to an American and had held a green card that was canceled without notice, an account he has offered without supporting documents.

The Trump administration rejected the suggestion that Yiannopoulos was targeted for his politics. Border czar Tom Homan said the case turned on the visa overstay, the missed immigration hearing and the final removal order, according to NOTUS. The Department of Homeland Security, announcing the arrest on X, called him an "illegal alien from the United Kingdom."

A feud with Loomer

The deportation deepened a long-running feud with Laura Loomer, a Trump ally who took a victory lap over the arrest and said she had repeatedly alerted federal officials to Yiannopoulos's immigration status. Loomer claimed she reported him to ICE and the FBI.

On X, Loomer wrote that she "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." She did not say what Yiannopoulos had allegedly done to incite violence.

Yiannopoulos returned fire, telling Morgan that the Trump administration "seems to have kind of devolved into the Loomer admin."

His fall from prominence on the right predates the arrest. Yiannopoulos was one of the most recognizable provocateurs of Trump's 2016 campaign, later attached himself to the rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, and helped to run Ye's short-lived presidential campaign. He has claimed credit for arranging a 2022 dinner at Mar-a-Lago attended by Trump, Ye and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes.

A record of provocation

Yiannopoulos, 41, joined Breitbart in 2014 as technology editor and drew wide notice through the Gamergate campaign and Trump's 2016 run, known for provocative attacks on feminism, Islam and immigrants. He resigned in 2017 after a video surfaced in which he appeared to condone sexual relationships between adult men and boys, for which he later apologized. He identified publicly as gay for years before declaring himself "ex-gay" in March 2021.

Beginning in 2016 he toured college campuses in appearances that drew student protests over what some called hate speech. He has equated feminism with cancer, said the United States has "a Muslim problem" and started a scholarship open only to young white men.

His standing on the right had frayed well before the arrest. NPR reported that his ties to former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, for whom he interned in 2022, had drawn criticism within the MAGA movement, and that he had grown openly critical of Trump.

Greene announced her resignation from Congress in November 2025, effective in January 2026, after a falling out with Trump, and has accused him of stonewalling the release of the Epstein files. She later said "it was all a lie."

In a 2025 podcast interview, before the arrest, Yiannopoulos had called Trump "bought, paid for, owned and operated" over the president's support for Israel.

What remains unclear

Yiannopoulos did not say whether he will challenge the removal order or try to return to the United States. He told Morgan that immigration authorities had tried to "keep ahead" of his lawyers while he was held, and that no one would tell him anything about his case.

The Department of Homeland Security, in a statement to NPR, said it would not allow "aliens in our country illegally to jet around our country." The agency publicized his arrest, including a booking photo.

Reflecting on the ordeal, Yiannopoulos told Morgan he had once been "cavalier" when others described their trauma and now understood it. He said the detention had left him emotionally wrecked, that he had never been so frightened, and that he would not wish deportation on anyone.