White nationalist and “alt-right” leader Richard Spencer was stopped on his way to Sweden and sent back to the United States because of a ban excluding him from most of the European Union, he said Friday.
Mr. Spencer, 39, was traveling to speak at an event Wednesday when he was stopped during a layover in Reykjavík, Iceland, he told The Washington Times.
Mr. Spencer said he was allowed to roam the international section of the airport for around six hours before officials told him he had to turn around because he had been barred by Poland from visiting the Schengen Area, a region composed of 26 E.U. member states that have abolished passport and customs controls between countries.
“I was turned around in Iceland, which is part of the Schengen Zone, due to Poland’s ban,” Mr. Spencer told The Times. “I was visited the Swedish embassy a month ago and was given the go ahead to visit. I asked about the potential ban, but they said it did not come up and that I was welcome to visit their country.”
Neither Swedish, Icelandic nor Polish officials immediately returned messages seeking comment.
The head of the National Policy Institute, a think tank “dedicated to the heritage, identity and future of people of European descent,” Mr. Spencer first gained notoriety in 2016 in tandem with the emergence of the so-called “alt-right,” a term he coined to describe the far-right ideology embraced by his organization’s members.
A video of him being assaulted on the day of President Trump’s inauguration went viral in early 2017, and he achieved infamy again in August over his participation in the failed “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in the death of a counterprotester.
Mr. Spencer told The Times that he was detained in Iceland while traveling to attend an event organized by Christoffer Dulny, a former member of the Swedish Democrats who currently helms the Nordisk Alternativhöger, or the Nordic Alternative Right, a Scandinavian alt-right group.
Mr. Spencer was previously banned from the Schengen Area for a three-year period beginning in 2014 for attempting to organize a white nationalist conference in Budapest, Hungary. Mr. Spencer had planned to return to the region within weeks of the ban’s October expiration, but he ultimately canceled a pair of speaking engagements scheduled in November after Poland’s Foreign Ministry warned he’d be denied entry.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.