It was extremely difficult to suppress feelings of satisfaction at seeing Milo Yiannopolous, the viciously racist alt-right troll, fall into the clutches of the ICE deportation machine he had egged on for so long. Yiannopoulous, a British national, had spent years going around the U.S. saying horrific things about immigrants, trans people, feminists, fat people—basically anyone who wasn’t a fit white male Christian like himself. In his speeches, he would encourage people to “purge the illegals” and give out ICE’s hotline number. He suggested that ICE raids sexually aroused him. He wanted “ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections and government buildings.” He said there should be “millions and millions and millions” of deportations. There needed to be “zero immigration for the next 20 years. No ifs, no buts.” He thought there should be “Total legal immunity for ICE agents when they're on duty."

But of course, he didn’t mean that he should be deported. “I mean bad immigrants," he said in 2016. "I don't mean handsome, charming, successful, blonde-haired British immigrants… It's about culture." He wanted Trump to deport Muslims like broadcaster Mehdi Hasan (who, unlike Yiannopoulos, is an American citizen.) Instead, Yiannopoulos himself was snagged and booted from the country.

The experience, as he describes it, was harrowing. The man who had once fantasized about seeing Hasan Piker “squeal 'I'm more American than you!' as they are dragging him onto his one way flight” found himself shackled, crying, and “covered in filth and stains and drool.” He was put in chains, which, he says, “hurts more than they make out on TV.” He called the experience “humiliating,” “disorienting” and “physically degrading,” noting that “I don’t think I’ve ever been frightened like that before.”

Yiannopoulos appears to realize that his objections to this treatment somewhat contradict his longstanding belief that ICE should be rough, ruthless, and not particularly interested in due process. “I stand exposed as a hypocrite who got what he asked for,” he writes in an essay for The Spectator. “I spent years demanding this agency be let off the leash. And so it is… I wanted millions indiscriminately deported, and said so – loudly, and in worse words. You have me.” Yiannopoulos says he now regrets his support for Donald Trump. But it’s not clear how much he’s really learned. Even in that essay, Yiannopoulos suggests that he is “the only person arrested by ICE in August who has not killed or raped anyone” and says he doesn’t “think they’ve done much deporting.” (He is also still clearly sexist, saying he began “weeping like an old woman.”) He doesn’t extend any empathy to others who have been shackled and denied due process, but describes himself as a persecuted dissident.

Yiannopoulos has such a long history of saying whatever is most calculated to get him attention that I hesitate to credit the sincerity of anything he writes. Does he actually regret supporting Trump? I don’t know. But let us assume for the moment that he has indeed faced a certain kind of “Ebenezer Scrooge” moment, being shown what his values look like from a different angle. We might well ask him: Now that you see how cruel and arbitrary this system is, given that you were a champion of building it, what are you going to do to help us dismantle it? Do you now understand why the political project you were part of is destructive and terrifying? Do you see why people have put their lives on the line to try to end this?

Yiannopoulos, of course, had it comparatively easy. He was shackled, and his experience sounds traumatic, but he ended up fairly quickly back in a comfortable setting in England. Here in Louisiana (incidentally, where Yiannopoulos was arrested), many immigrants are “detained” (imprisoned) for years, where they are kept from seeing their families. As an attorney at the National Immigration Project says, “people are just sitting in these cages with no end in sight,” people languishing for “extremely, extremely, unfathomably prolonged periods of time,” many who have committed no crime. The conditions in these prisons (I refuse to use the term “detention center,” which is a euphemism) are often horrific.

Consider the situation Haitians are now in. Haiti is so overrun with violent gangs that the State Department formally advises that nobody should go there right now, period. “Do not travel to Haiti for any reason” due to the risk of “crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care,” reads the official government travel advisory. The FAA won’t even let U.S. planes try to land in the country’s capital, due to the risk they’ll be shot down. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians had been living and working in the U.S. lawfully on Temporary Protected Status since the country’s 2010 earthquake. Despite vicious racist myths about Haitians stealing and eating people’s cats in Ohio (which Trump and Vance personally amplified), even the state’s Republican governor vouched for the Haitian community, which he described as hardworking and decent. Nevertheless, the second Trump administration revoked the protections and began sending Haitians back to face poverty and gang violence. (They found another airport to fly into.) Those still in the U.S. are being fitted with ankle monitors and having work permits revoked. Many who have spent years following the rules and working to build a life here are now terrified for their futures. One young Haitian man, who had been fitted with an ankle monitor and felt ashamed and humiliated, committed suicide by walking into oncoming traffic. (Yiannopoulos himself, when the “cat-eating” story circulated, commented that “it’s not just Haitians we have to look out for.”)

Contrary to Yiannopoulos’ ignorant claim that nobody else is being deported, ICE arrests reached record levels in July. More than 800 people without criminal records are being arrested per day. What has declined is public protest against the administration’s policies. As Kieran Doyle of ACLED writes:

“Even as ICE arrests broke record numbers, pro-immigration demonstrations declined to their lowest levels since early 2025, shortly after Trump began his second term. Amid a record 50,000 ICE arrests in July, pro-immigration demonstrations in the United States were nearly 10 times less frequent than shortly after the backlash over a controversial ICE operation in Minneapolis in January.”

The data are striking. Protests have dropped precipitously over the last few months:

Doyle attributes this to new DHS director Markwayne Mullin’s deliberate strategy of “keeping ICE out of the headlines.” Now, you might wonder whether ICE has also stopped murdering people, which could contribute to a decline in visible public outrage. After all, the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti were important sparks for protest. But as Doyle notes, “Mullin’s strategy has not prevented the same kind of deadly encounters from taking place, yet these incidents have not caused the same degree of uproar among protesters. In the space of six days in early July, ICE agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican man, in Houston, Texas, and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian man, in Biddeford, Maine, both during traffic stops.” Doyle notes that these deaths were not caught on camera, though. He does not mention the other obvious fact: Good and Pretti were white. ICE has not stopped killing people, but it has stopped killing white people, at least for the moment, and those are the victims the media primarily cares about. (Notice, also, how many accounts of the ICE killings this spring mention Pretti and Good but not Keith Porter, Jr.) Clearly Mullin understands that having Greg Bovino showing up in his Nazi trenchcoat and assassinating VA nurses is not a good look for the agency, and the deportation machine needed to improve its optics problem. So far, it’s working.

Even U.S. citizens are being deported. Trump voters with immigrant spouses are finding, like Yiannopoulos, that they are not sure they wanted what they asked for. One Texas businessman whose Venezuelan wife was swarmed and arrested by eight ICE agents at the airport says “I voted for Trump… They are picking up law-abiding citizens. They're destroying families, jobs." Yiannopoulos himself 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.”

To this, I have to say: Oh, come on. It is over ten years since the absurdity of this sentiment was captured in the classic tweet: "'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party." They were holding signs that said “mass deportation now” at the RNC! What did you think that meant? If you want a ruthless system that doesn’t care about legal niceties or make fine distinctions, and you portray ordinary people as marauding cat-eaters or gang members, well, this is what happens. Babies and toddlers will be put into detention facilities. People will die in these places, because they are treated like animals. People will be shackled, humiliated, deprived of food and water. Families will be torn apart, people who have done nothing wrong will be rounded up and thrown in cages. This is the kind of system that those who voted for Trump asked for.

It is a horror. And it will get worse, because ICE is still not even halfway to the administration’s daily arrest target, and billions of dollars are flowing into the agency. And so those who understand what a nightmare is being created have a responsibility to try to dismantle this machine before it destroys more lives, before more people kill themselves or are killed, before refugees are sent back to be murdered by gangs, or promising young students have their whole lives wrecked. Yiannopoulos in particular, now that he at least partly understands what he’s done, has a heavy moral debt to pay. Nothing in his career of nasty trolling and self-aggrandizement suggests to me that he will make an effort to pay it, and I won’t be surprised if he just starts promoting the British far-right instead. But any decent person who has come to grasp the brutal and depraved nature of the society MAGA is building must do whatever they can to try to reverse the slide toward a dystopian prison state.