CBS News’ 60 Minutes pulled a planned segment on the Trump administration’s deportation of mugrants to a harsh El Salvador prison.
“The broadcast lineup for tonight’s edition of 60 Minutes has been updated. Our report ‘Inside CECOT’ will air in a future broadcast,” the network announced on Sunday evening, just hours before the planned broadcast.
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CBS News said of the segment, “We determined it needed additional reporting.”
It’s a highly unusual move for the show to pull a segment so close to its airtime.
CBS News announced the segment on the 60 Minutes schedule last week. Per the network, the segment’s logline was: “Earlier this year, the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, a country most had no ties to, claiming they were terrorists. This move sparked an ongoing legal battle, and nine months later the U.S. government still has not released the names of all those deported and placed in CECOT, one of El Salvador’s harshest prisons.”
The segment was to feature correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi speaking to deportees who told of “brutal and tortuous conditions,” per the network. In its place is a segment from Nottingham, England, where correspondent Jon Wertheim interviewed a family of celebrated classical musicians.
Trump has continued to rail against 60 Minutes, most recently for Lesley Stahl’s interview with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), now one of the president’s high profile critics from the right.
Trump wrote on Truth Social, “My real problem with the show, however, wasn’t the low IQ traitor, it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air. THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP, who just paid me millions of Dollars for FAKE REPORTING about your favorite President, ME!”
Last year, Trump sued 60 Minutes over edits made to an interview with his 2024 presidential rival, Kamala Harris. Although CBS had initially dismissed the lawsuit as baseless, its parent company Paramount Global settled the litigation for $16 million, as it sought Trump administration approval for its merger with Skydance.
At a recent ceremony to receive a Walter Cronkite Award, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley said of the network’s new owners, “We were all concerned at 60 Minutes about what that meant. It’s early yet, but what I can tell you is we are doing to same kinds of stories with the same kind of rigor, and we have experienced no corporate interference of any kind.”
In April, the previous executive producer of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, resigned, saying that he no longer was able to “run the show as I have always run it,” and to “make independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes, right for the audience.”
Paramount has made a hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, a transaction that would also require approval from the Trump administration. The president has said that he will be part of the regulatory approval process, breaking the norm of keeping an arm’s length from the Justice Department review.
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