CBS Finally Airs Updated ’60 Minutes’ Report On US Deportations To Salvadoran Prison

Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

CBS’s “60 Minutes” finally aired its report on the Trump administration’s deportations, more than a month after the segment was taken down from the program’s lineup.

In the report, broadcast on Jan. 18, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi examined deportees sent to El Salvador’s maximum-security prison, known by its Spanish acronym CECOT. It aired without any mention of the story having previously been pulled from its originally scheduled date, Dec. 21, 2025.

The unaired segment nevertheless appeared online a day after it was pulled. Global TV, which airs “60 Minutes” in Canada, briefly featured the piece on its app, apparently by mistake.

CBS News said in an emailed statement to The Epoch Times that its leadership “has always been committed to airing the ‘60 Minutes’ CECOT piece as soon as it was ready.”

“Tonight, viewers get to see it, along with other important stories, all of which speak to CBS News’ independence and the power of our storytelling,” it said.

The segment, titled “Inside CECOT,” featured interviews with two Venezuelan men being held in the Salvadoran prison after being deported from the United States.

Last year, as part of an effort to deliver what President Donald Trump has said will be the largest deportation of illegal immigrants in U.S. history, he invoked the wartime Enemy Aliens Act to fast-track the removal of alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The Trump administration paid the Salvadoran government millions of dollars to send more than 200 of those Venezuelan deportees to CECOT.

The two Venezuelans interviewed by “60 Minutes” described conditions inside the prison, which they said included beatings, living in cramped cells where the lights stayed on 24 hours a day, and being forced to kneel for hours at a time.

The report was largely unchanged from the Dec. 22 version. The updated version included a short clip of Trump saying that CECOT has “very strong facilities” where security staff “don’t play games,” and another of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying that “heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, sexual assaulters, predators who have no right to be in this country” were sent there.

Alfonsi’s introduction was updated to open with the Jan. 3 military operation that led to the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, who is currently in U.S. custody awaiting trial on federal narco-terrorism charges. In the new material, she also said she obtained data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement suggesting 33 of the 252 Venezuelan prisoners had been convicted of a crime in the United States, and reiterated a statistic from the original report that eight had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense.

In the segment, Alfonsi said the Department of Homeland Security declined her request for an on-camera interview and referred questions about the prison to the government of El Salvador, which did not respond. DHS did, however, provide an explanation for why it would not share detailed records about the individuals sent to CECOT.

“We are confident in our law enforcement’s intelligence, and we aren’t going to share intelligence reports and undermine national security every time a gang member denies he is one,” DHS wrote in an email to CBS News shown in the segment. “That would be insane.”