A 60 Minutes segment detailing the Trump administration’s deportations to a notorious maximum security prison in El Salvador aired Sunday evening, capping off weeks of controversy over the report’s delay due to concerns it was missing “context.”
CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss initially postponed the report in December 2025, when it was originally scheduled to be aired. She cited complaints that correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi’s segment on the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo did not have input from relevant senior figures in the Trump administration. “This is 60 Minutes, we need to be able to get the principals on the record and on camera,” to “advance the ball,” she told staff, according to previous reports. The network has maintained the “independence” of its storytelling, and that the postponement was a good-faith editorial clash amid the controversy.
In a statement Sunday, the network said that CBS News leadership “has always been committed to airing the 60 MINUTES CECOT piece as soon as it was ready.” Alfonsi had complained about the delay in an email released to several outlets, sparking concern about political pressure on media due to her allegations that the decision to pull the report “is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
CBS aired the piece at the same time as NBC’s coverage of the NFL’s divisional playoff game between the Los Angeles Rams and Chicago Bears, meaning its viewership was likely to be down compared to most 60 Minutes broadcasts.
“60 will not have the audience it normally does,” a CBS network staffer told the Guardian.
The broadcast was largely from the perspective of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to CECOT due to accusations that they are terrorists. Alfonsi interviewed inmates who were later released, with the segment detailing the men’s account of “torture, sexual and physical abuse inside CECOT, one of El Salvador’s harshest prisons.” The United States has sent hundreds of alleged illegal immigrants, many of them Venezuelan and suspected of belonging to the notorious Tren de Aragua and MS-13 gangs, to the facility.
The segment aired this week was largely unchanged from December’s report, which was mistakenly streamed on a Canadian outlet and widely circulated online. It did add statements from the White House and Department of Homeland Security pushing back against the outlet, and complaining that the public “hears far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.” And Alfonsi included photos of tattoos from the administration showing tattoos worn by the two former inmates she interviewed, including one swastika.
Notably, CBS News also added a series of comments from the White House on the piece to the front page of the outlet’s website. Still, the story shown on Sunday included no on-camera interviews with Trump administration officials. Weiss worked to personally book an interview with a relevant Trump official, such as DHS Secretary Kristi Noem or acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement head Tom Homan, according to CNN, but the appearance never materialized after Alfonsi flew in to Washington for a possible taping last Thursday.
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Alfonsi has slammed the White House for detailing its position to the public for her segment. “Since November, ‘60 Minutes’ has made several attempts to interview key Trump administration officials on camera about our story,” she said in the segment aired Sunday. “They declined our requests.”
“Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story,” the correspondent previously wrote in an internal memo. “If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.”