Far-right British influencer Milo Yiannopoulos was arrested at a New Orleans airport and deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last week for overstaying his visa.

Yiannopoulos, once a high-profile figure in the early Trump movement and a former Breitbart editor, had been a longtime vocal advocate of hardline immigration enforcement. His case is notable because it shows the Trump administration's expanded deportation drive reaching even figures from within the president's own political orbit.

Now, in an interview with Piers Morgan on his "Uncensored" show in London, Yiannopoulos admitted he had no idea how demeaning and painful it was to be on the receiving end of the immigration system, despite spending years calling for mass deportations.

"I don't think I've ever been frightened like that before," Yiannopoulos told Morgan. "I didn't really understand the physical reality of how institutionalized 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."

"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," he added. "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."

Yiannopoulos said the incident — the first time he has ever been arrested in his life — has shaken his support for President Donald Trump to its core, particularly since fellow far-right influencer and "Trump whisperer" Laura Loomer has taken credit for putting a target on his back. Loomer, a vocal Trump ally known for promoting conspiracy theories, has previously been credited with influencing administration personnel decisions.

"I went to work for her campaign when she ran for Congress the first time ... it was clear after a couple of weeks, there was something very, very wrong with her," Yiannopoulos said of Loomer. "But unfortunately, she's fallen into this kind of symbiotic, sort of toxic relationship with Trump where he can't get enough of her obsequious toadying praise and she can't get enough of the clout from the proximity. And so I think he allows her to run riot because he likes anybody who praises him, especially, I guess, these days, because they're pretty few and far between."

"To think that the promise and hope and joy and the anticipation of Trump 2016 could, sort of, over the course of ten years, collapse into this ugly, warmongering, whole mentally ill heap of crazy — with some of the most unstable and lunatic people, seemingly directing the President's actions!" he said. "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."

When Morgan confronted him over the hypocrisy of turning on ICE only after being deported himself, Yiannopoulos did not fight the accusation. "You got me!" he said. He argued that immigration agents should be focusing on violent criminals and drug dealers rather than people who overstay their visas — a tension at the heart of the broader debate over the administration's deportation push, which critics say has swept up nonviolent offenders alongside those with criminal records.

Source: Raw Story