While the furor over CBS News’ decision to delay a planned “60 Minutes” report about deportees sent by the Trump administration to a notorious Salvadoran prison continued Monday, the intended segment was already circulating online, having been streamed in Canada.
The report, titled “Inside CECOT,” was streamed by Canada’s Global Television Network. In the U.S., its broadcast was postponed by CBS under its new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss.
It includes interviews from people who were deported from the U.S. to the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, or CECOT, under the Trump administration. The interviewees described torture and physical and sexual abuse at the complex.
“When we got there, the CECOT director was talking to us. The first thing he told us was that we would never see the light of day or night again,” Luis Munoz Pinto, a college student in Venezuela who went to the U.S. to seek asylum, told the TV news magazine.
“He said, ‘Welcome to hell. I’ll make sure you never leave,’” said Munoz, who the report noted has since been released.
He told the program that he was awaiting a decision on his asylum claim when he was deported to CECOT this year — one of 252 Venezuelans sent there between March and April.
Neither CBS nor Global Television Network immediately responded to respective requests for comment late Monday and early Tuesday.
The segment featured a clip of President Donald Trump describing El Salvador’s prisons as “great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don’t play games,” while seated next to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele during a meeting at the White House earlier this year. It also showed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s visit to CECOT in March in which she thanked Bukele and El Salvador for their “partnership” with the U.S. to incarcerate what she called “terrorists” at the facility.
Neither the White House nor the Department of Homeland Security immediately responded outside regular business hours early Tuesday to emailed requests for comment about the contents of the segment that aired in Canada.
“Inside CECOT” was anchored by correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, who was critical of the decision to delay the segment’s broadcast. In a note to colleagues seen by NBC News, she accused the network of pulling the segment for “political” reasons.
In the note, she said it was pulled because the Trump administration refused requests for comment — a standard that she said, if adopted, would amount a government “kill switch” to stop publication of a story.
“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” Alfonsi wrote in the note.
“It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one,” she said.
Weiss is a former opinion writer and editor at The New York Times who launched the website The Free Press in 2021. Paramount Skydance, which owns CBS, acquired The Free Press and hired Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News in October.
Critics at the time noted that The Free Press was an online outlet that portrayed itself as being against “ideological narratives,” particularly on the political left, and that Weiss has worked mainly in the opinion sphere.
She resigned from the New York Times in 2020 after three years, writing that there was an “illiberal environment” there and that “My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views.”
Among the critics of the decision to pull Sunday’s “60 Minutes” segment were the free speech nonprofit PEN America and FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, an appointee of former President Joe Biden who called it “deeply alarming.”
“CBS journalists, among the best in this country, appropriately made an outreach effort to get the government to weigh in on a deeply reported story out of El Salvador,” Tim Richardson, journalism and disinformation program director at PEN America said in a statement.
“Pulling it back at the last minute because the government chose not to respond is an insult not only to the integrity of the journalists but to core principles of independent news gathering,” he said.
Weiss in a statement said that the piece was only held, which she said is not unusual.
“Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason — that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready,” Weiss said in the statement.
In an editorial call Monday morning, Weiss said that “I held a 60 Minutes story because it was not ready,” according to a source.
“While the story presented powerful testimony of torture at CECOT, it did not advance the ball — The Times and other outlets have previously done similar work,” she said, according to that source.
President Trump ran on a platform of mass deportations, and his administration began deporting people to El Salvador and CECOT in March, citing the previously rarely used Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
Among those sent to CECOT was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported there contrary to a judge’s order, and who was subsequently returned to the U.S. and who was ordered released from immigration custody on Dec. 11. On Monday, a federal judge allowed him to remain free while she considers immigration proceedings in Abrego Garcia’s case.
The 252 Venezuelan men referred to in the “60 Minutes” report were released from CECOT in July in exchange for the release of 10 Americans held in Venezuela.
