Fact Check: Did Billie Eilish Deported 'Activist' Drew Pavlou Who Posted Online Jokes About Her?

Drew Pavlou, 26, says Billie Eilish got him deported from the United States. That is his claim. The rather more boring explanation — that a man who publicly announced he was flying to America to trespass on a celebrity's property, crowdfunded the trip, and has a cleared bomb threat on his record was flagged at the border for entirely routine reasons — has not gone as viral.

Pavlou posted on X on 15 February that he had spent more than 30 hours in custody at Los Angeles International Airport. 'Billie Eilish got me deported from the US — I think her legal team contacted DHS,' he wrote. 'I spent 30 hours at LAX immigration trying to explain that my shitposts were just a joke and that I didn't actually plan to personally move into her mansion.'

The post has more than 10 million views. Elon Musk replied: 'Most ironic outcome is most likely.'

What He Actually Said He Was Going to Do

This started on 1 February. Eilish accepted Song of the Year at the 68th Grammy Awards wearing an 'ICE OUT' pin and told the audience: 'As grateful as I feel, I honestly don't feel like I need to say anything but that no one is illegal on stolen land. And f**k ICE, that's all I'm gonna say.'

Within hours, people pointed out that her home — a 2,100-square-foot property in Glendale, California, with a guesthouse, horse stables and an arena — sits on the ancestral land of the Tongva people, the Indigenous nation of the greater Los Angeles basin. Pavlou decided to test the logic. He announced he would fly to LA and 'move into' Eilish's mansion, arguing that if no one is illegal on stolen land, she should have no objection to finding him in her driveway.

'Everything here is completely and totally legal,' he wrote. 'I am just going to set up a tent on her driveway, and I will leave when they formally ask me to leave. No human being is illegal on stolen land.'

He launched a GoFundMe. It raised approximately $3,000 before the platform took it down. He moved to GiveSendGo and kept collecting.

Then he bought a ticket.

What Happened at LAX

Pavlou never made it to Glendale. According to his own account, CBP officers detained him on arrival and questioned him for over 30 hours. They asked whether he planned to trespass on Eilish's property. He told them he was shitposting. They asked whether he planned to contact or confront the singer. He said no. They asked whether he had ever threatened to blow up Chinese government installations.

He laughed. They did not.

That last question is not random. In July 2022, Pavlou was arrested at the Chinese Embassy in London during a protest against the Uyghur genocide. Metropolitan Police alleged he had emailed a bomb threat to the embassy — a threat Pavlou insists was fabricated by the Chinese state using a fake email address. He was held for 23 hours, denied access to a lawyer, and released without charge. The case was eventually dropped, but it remains on his file; the kind of thing that would absolutely come up in a CBP database when a foreign national with a history of international protest incidents lands at an American airport and has recently announced plans to trespass on a celebrity's property.

Pavlou claimed the agents seemed to have a detailed file — a 'dossier,' in his telling — on his online activity. He alleged this proved Eilish's lawyers had contacted DHS. No evidence has surfaced to confirm that. What has surfaced is that Pavlou posted his plans publicly to an audience of hundreds of thousands, raised money for the trip on two separate crowdfunding platforms, and described the intended trespass in detail across multiple social media posts that any border agent with a phone could have found in thirty seconds.

Whether Eilish's legal team picked up the phone is, in a sense, beside the point. Pavlou handed customs everything they needed without anyone's help.

Airport authorities told him he had entered on the wrong visa. He insists it is not a permanent ban and that he can reapply.

Who Drew Pavlou Actually Is

Pavlou is a Greek Cypriot Australian from Brisbane, a philosophy student turned professional provocateur whose confrontations with the Chinese Communist Party have made him genuinely famous in certain circles — and genuinely detained in several countries.

In 2019, he organised a pro-Hong Kong democracy protest at the University of Queensland that ended in violent clashes with pro-Beijing counter-protesters. He was suspended for two years (later reduced to six months on appeal). He sued the Chinese consul-general in Brisbane, alleging he had incited violence; the case was thrown out on diplomatic immunity grounds. He disrupted the 2022 Wimbledon final by shouting 'Where is Peng Shuai?' — a reference to the Chinese tennis star who vanished after accusing a senior CCP official of sexual assault — and was ejected from Centre Court. He drove a truck of humanitarian supplies to Lviv after Russia invaded Ukraine. He formed his own political party, ran for the Australian Senate, and received 4,555 first-preference votes in Queensland.

The Part Nobody Mentioned

Lost in the deportation circus is a detail that deserved better. The Tongva people — the Gabrieleño Tongva San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians, whose ancestral territory includes the entire Los Angeles basin — confirmed to Newsweek that Eilish's Glendale property sits on their land. They did not object to her words. What they did say is that she has never contacted the tribe directly, and that they would prefer public figures to name the Tongva specifically rather than using 'stolen land' as a blank slogan without saying whose land it was.

That request has been almost entirely drowned out. Senator Mike Lee said anyone who makes a 'stolen land' acknowledgement should hand their property over. Kevin O'Leary told Eilish to 'shut your mouth and just entertain'. Mark Ruffalo told O'Leary to shut up. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem called the Grammy performers 'ill-informed famous musicians'. Elon Musk called Eilish a 'hypocrite'. Trump called the Grammys 'garbage'. Finneas, Eilish's brother, responded on Threads: 'Seeing a lot of very powerful old white men outraged about what my 24-year-old sister said during her acceptance speech.'

Senators, cabinet secretaries, billionaires, a Shark Tank host, the Hulk, and an Australian shitposter who got food poisoning from a microwave burrito in a holding cell at LAX. All talking about Billie Eilish.

The only person not talking about Billie Eilish is Billie Eilish. She has said nothing since the Grammy speech. Not about Pavlou. Not about the Tongva. Not about any of it.

Pavlou, for his part, signed off with a Billie Eilish song reference that customs might have appreciated: 'I guess some people are, in fact, actually illegal on stolen land. And I guess I am just a bad guy.'

He says he is not done. That much, at least, is consistent with his record.