What’s Milo’s Age Again?
Our title riffs on a line from Blink-182’s “What’s My Age Again?”: “This state looks down on sodomy.” We’ve changed “this” to “the” because our subject is the state in the broader sense—the government and its enforcement power, rather than any particular state of the Union.
The title is metaphorical. According to DHS, Milo Yiannopoulos entered the United States legally in May 2019, overstayed his visa, and received a final removal order after failing to appear for an immigration hearing. ICE arrested him at the New Orleans airport on Thursday, and he was deported to the United Kingdom on Friday.
The lyric came to mind because Milo’s public life has become a succession of theatrical identities. After rebranding himself as an “ex-gay” Christian, he later joked that perhaps he was still gay and referred publicly to “my husband.” His private life is beside the point. His own posts punctured the persona he had sold his audience.
His immigration politics followed the same pattern. Milo spent years positioning himself to Trump’s right and demanding more deportations. When the administration finally enforced the law against him, his defenders treated his case as an exception to the universal enforcement they had demanded. That spectacle tells us something about Milo, but it tells us more about today’s performative right.
Milo Asked For Results
In January 2025, just days after Trump’s second inauguration, Milo complained that deportations were running below Biden’s averages and were headed for a “pathetic” annual total. “Americans want results,” he wrote. As the pseudonymous X account Prowler observed after Milo’s arrest, DHS delivered.
Milo’s own case refutes the claim that enforcement is merely rhetorical. He was a well-connected celebrity who had lived openly in the United States for years. He nevertheless walked into an airport with a final removal order and was arrested. His celebrity and connections (including working for Trump’s friend Kanye West) failed to produce a carve-out.
By the standard Milo had publicly demanded, his removal is a result. His defenders recast it as betrayal, preserving a posture in which every enforcer remains impure and every result inadequate.
The Hundred-Million-Alien Fantasy
The same posture was on display when Tucker Carlson introduced former Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino by declaring that there are more than 100 million illegal aliens in the United States and that Trump has no intention of deporting them.
A 2018 Yale/MIT study modeled the 2016 population at a mean of 22.1 million, with a 95% probability interval of 16.2 million to 29.5 million. The authors stressed the uncertainty surrounding key assumptions, particularly apprehension and voluntary-emigration rates. Give the 100-million claim every benefit of the doubt and use the study’s upper bound anyway: it’s still more than three times too high. One hundred million would mean nearly one out of every three people in America is here illegally.
A 100-million denominator makes almost any real-world enforcement result look trivial. Arrest 50,000 people in a month? Call it five one-hundredths of one percent. Deport hundreds of thousands? Announce that the country is still doomed. Its political effect is to make progress mathematically impossible.
That’s demoralization propaganda. It flatters the audience for seeing through the supposed betrayal, keeps them angry, and relieves the commentator of having to distinguish between “not enough” and “not happening.”
The Bovino Problem
Bovino was good at producing images of enforcement: tactical gear, dramatic raids, press conferences, magazine profiles. Those images may have thrilled supporters, but they also made him a lightning rod and gave opponents a single face around which to organize resistance.
After the administration moved away from some of the high-profile operations that generated public backlash, enforcement accelerated. ICE made 49,571 arrests in July, the highest monthly total of Trump’s second term—15% more than in June and 70% more than in February. The Associated Press noted that the increase continued as the administration shifted toward less visible tactics.
As one restrictionist critic summarized bluntly, the photo shoots stopped and the enforcement machinery sped up.
A competent government should want boring enforcement: routine arrests, reliable transport, completed cases, and removal flights that work without a celebrity spokesman. The more immigration enforcement resembles ordinary administration instead of political theater, the harder it is for activists to disrupt and the easier it is to sustain.
What The Administration Is Actually Doing
As Prowler summarized over the weekend, the available data show removal flights, removal orders, and ICE arrests at record highs, while border crossings and releases remain at record lows.
The record extends to legal immigration. Since January, the State Department has fully or partially suspended visa issuance for nationals of 39 countries, with limited exceptions. It has imposed visa-bond requirements on nationals of dozens of countries and placed a $100,000 condition on many new H-1B petitions.
Performance Or Principle?
The performative right needs Trump to fail. That story collapses when interior arrests and removal operations reach record levels, border crossings and releases stay at record lows, and sweeping new legal-immigration restrictions take effect. The administration’s record demands judgment about scale and durability. Tucker’s claim that Trump has “no intention” of deporting illegal aliens requires ignoring the enforcement machinery already at work.
Milo’s deportation is a small but clarifying case. He demanded results. He got them.
The state looked down on overstaying a visa and skipping an immigration hearing.