The minister says Yee’s case shows how foreign media and rights advocates have mistaken an offensive repeat offender for a free-speech icon
3-MIN READ3-MIN ListenSCMP’s Asia deskPublished: 8:20pm, 6 Apr 2026Singapore’s Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam has said he wished the United States had kept controversial blogger and child sex convict Amos Yee, warning that foreign media and rights advocates have mistaken a repeat offender, who was deported back to the city state, for a free-speech icon.Yee, who is listed on a US Department of Homeland Security website as among the “worst of the worst criminal aliens” the Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested, was deported from the US on March 19 and arrested upon arrival at Changi Airport the next day.
The 27-year-old is charged with violating Singapore’s compulsory military service rules.
“I wish the Americans had kept him,” Shanmugam said when shown Yee’s image during an interview on The Rishi Report podcast on Friday.
Yee was granted asylum in the US in 2017 on the basis that he had been persecuted for his political views, but was later imprisoned for sex offences and removed after his release.
Shanmugam said the episode exposed “a tremendous hypocrisy” among “some media in the West” and others who had, in his view, reflexively cast Yee as a victim of political repression because he appeared anti-government.
