Senator James Orengo said John Aristotle Phillips, chief executive of political technology and data provider Aristotle Inc., was detained late on Friday along with a Canadian national, whom he did not name.

The pair were being deported, he added.

Besides his work on political data analysis, Phillips is known in the United States as the „A-Bomb Kid“ for designing an atomic weapon from publicly available information while studying as an undergraduate at Princeton in the 1970s.