60 Minutes abruptly canceled a segment about a notorious El Salvador megaprison that houses deportees kicked out of the U.S. by President Donald Trump.
The iconic CBS newsmagazine show announced that the scheduled portion of the show covering the Terrorism Confinement Center—dubbed CECOT or Terrorism Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo in Spanish—will be aired at a later date instead.
“The broadcast lineup for tonight’s edition of 60 Minutes has been updated. Our report ‘Inside CECOT’ will air in a future broadcast,” it said in a statement.
’60 Minutes’ announced the last-minute scheduling change less than three hours before the show was set to air. X/60Minutes
A CBS News spokesperson told Puck News that the episode “needed additional reporting.” A “well-placed” source, however, told Puck’s Dylan Byers: “It did not need additional reporting. It went through every layer of fact-checking and was reviewed by all the lawyers.” Byers reported that the episode was ready to go until it was seen by CBS News chief Bari Weiss, who decided to hold it.
The episode will likely be held pending comment or an interview with White House officials next year, according to Semafor.
The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reported that 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi told her colleagues in an email that Weiss “spiked” the story: “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct.”
The Daily Beast also reached out to the network for comment.
A teaser for the episode, now deleted from official 60 Minutes accounts but circulating on social media, opens with chilling scenes of an infamous deportation flight earlier this year.
“The deportees thought they were headed from the U.S. back to Venezuela, but instead they were shackled, paraded in front of cameras and delivered to CECOT, the notorious maximum security prison in El Salvador, where they told 60 Minutes they endured four months of hell,” Sharyn Alfonsi said.
“Did you think you were going to die there?” she asked a deportee.
“We thought we were already the living dead,” he responded.
In March, 238 men were deported to CECOT after the Trump administration accused them of ties to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Trump had worked closely with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele to find a facility that could house the deportees.
“We’re getting them out, and the president is helping us with that—President Bukele,” Trump told Fox News in April. “So, I was very impressed with him, very, very impressed.”
“People go, and they feel very secure and safe. He’s also built one but also other prisons. Very big ones, and we’re using his system because we’re getting rid of our criminals from out of the United States that were allowed to come in by Biden,” he added.
A 60 Minutes investigation found, however, that 75 percent of the 238 men deported had no criminal record. Twenty-two percent did have a criminal history—mostly for non-violent offenses like theft, shoplifting, and trespassing—and 3 percent had unclear records.
Among the deported men was Maryland dad Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose case stirred uproar after the Trump administration admitted that it wrongfully deported him as a result of an “administrative error.” He was returned to the U.S. in June.
60 Minutes pushed back its CECOT episode after Trump told a North Carolina rally Friday that he “loves” the new owners of CBS—his friends in the powerful Ellison family, who own the network’s parent company, Paramount.
“CBS, I mean, I love the new owners of CBS. Something happened to them, though; 60 Minutes has treated me worse under the new ownership. They just keep hitting me. It’s crazy,” he said.
The Ellisons are engaged in a high-stakes bidding war against Netflix for control of Warner Bros. Discovery. But regardless of who wins the Hollywood tug-of-war, a merger would require approval from the MAGAfied Justice Department.
Trump has also given his seal of approval to Weiss, the MAGA-curious founder of The Free Press who was named editor-in-chief of CBS News in October.
“I think you have a great, new leader, frankly, ’cause the young woman that’s leading your whole enterprise is a great—from what I know. I don’t know her, but I hear she’s a great person,” Trump told 60 Minutes last month. “I see good things happening in the news. I really do. And I think one of the best things to happen is this show and new ownership, CBS and new ownership.”
Trump has long had a fractious relationship with 60 Minutes, largely over an October 2024 episode with Kamala Harris that he claims was unfairly edited to make his opponent appear more favorable. Paramount eventually bent the knee by paying Trump $16 million to settle his lawsuit over the interview.
Under its new leadership, 60 Minutes aired a 28-minute version and released an extended 73-minute cut of Trump’s November sitdown with Norah O’Donnell. A full transcript, however, revealed that the network left out Trump’s testy exchange with O’Donnell over his pardon of a crypto billionaire.
That hasn’t stopped Trump from whining about his least-favorite Sunday show.
President Donald Trump threw yet another Truth Social tantrum about ’60 Minutes’ on Tuesday. Donald Trump on Truth Social
“For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that 60 Minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before. If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!” he wrote in a Truth Social post last week.