A 60 Minutes segment on human rights abuses at the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) prison in El Salvador leaked online Monday, after it was removed from Sunday night’s broadcast in a move a CBS News journalist described as “corporate censorship.”
The Canadian outlet Global News aired the episode without the “Inside CECOT” segment, but the wrong episode was uploaded to its Global TV app, according to Variety. The 14-minute segment quickly spread on social media apps like Substack and X.
In the segment, journalist Sharyn Alfonsi interviews two men who were among the 252 Venezuelans deported to CECOT in El Salvador earlier this year. The Trump administration claimed the men were terrorists and invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify deporting them immediately without due process.
“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. ‘Welcome to hell. I’ll make sure you never leave,’” said Luis Munoz Pinto, a college student in Venezuela who sought asylum in the U.S.
Pinto was detained by customs for six months before being sent to CECOT.
“There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves,” he said. “Four guards grabbed me, and they beat me until I bled, until the point of agony. They knocked our faces against the wall. That was when they broke one of my teeth.”
Pinto and William Lazada Sanchez, another Venezuelan national interviewed by 60 Minutes, said detainees were often sent to “the island,” a solitary confinement cell.
“The island is a little room where there’s no light, no ventilation, nothing,” Sanchez said. “It’s a cell for punishment where you can’t see your hand in front of your face. After they locked us in, they came to beat us every half hour, and they pounded on the door with their sticks to traumatize us while we were in there.”
“The torture was never-ending,” Pinto said. “They would take you there and beat you for hours and leave you locked in there for days.”
CECOT was built in 2022 as part of Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele’s so-called “War Against the Gangs,” in which tens of thousands of people alleged to be gang members have been arrested. In November, Human Rights Watch released a report stating that CECOT detainees are subject to “constant beatings” and inhumane treatment such as inadequate food, a lack of hygiene and sanitation, a lack of health care and medicine, a lack of recreational or educational activities, and sexual abuse.
The report determined that 48.8% of the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador in March had no criminal record in the United States, and only 8 of them (3.1%) had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense.
“These people are migrants, and the sad reality is the U.S. government tried to make an example out of them,” Juan Pappier, the Americas deputy director at Human Rights Watch, told 60 Minutes.
“They sent them to a place where they were likely to be tortured,” Pappier continued. “To send migrants across Latin America, the message: that they should not come to the United States.”
In the segment, Alfonsi said the Department of Homeland Security denied requests for an interview and referred all questions about CECOT to the Salvadorian government, which did not respond to CBS News’ requests for comment.
Less than three hours before the Sunday broadcast, CBS announced that the “Inside CECOT” segment would be pulled.
Bari Weiss, the newly appointed “editor-in-chief” of CBS News, held the story because no Trump administration officials were included. She said it would air at a later date and “needed additional reporting.”
“I held that story because it wasn’t ready,” Weiss told staffers, according to a source who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity.
“The story presented very powerful testimony of abuse at CECOT, but that testimony has already been reported on by places like the [New York] Times,” Weiss said. “The public knows that Venezuelans have been subjected to horrific treatment in this prison. So to run a story on this subject, two months later, we simply need to do more.”
Weiss first saw the segment on Thursday and asked for “a significant amount of new material to be added,” according to a report from The New York Times.
Weiss suggested the segment include an interview with Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, according to two sources who spoke with the Times. Weiss also reportedly questioned the use of the word “migrants” to describe the Venezuelan men.
Alfonsi said her story was “factually correct” and had been screened multiple times and cleared by CBS’s lawyers and its standards department. She criticized Weiss for making a “political” decision to pull the story and said the Trump administration’s refusal to provide comment was “a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.”
“If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike the story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient,” Alfonsi said in an email to colleagues.
“If the standard for airing a story becomes ‘the government must agree to be interviewed,’ then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast,” Alfonsi continued. “We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.”
Alfonsi went on to say that without a credible explanation for pulling the story, “the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship.”
This controversy has helped to amplify questions regarding Weiss’s role as editor, which critics say is to help CBS News appeal to President Donald Trump after he filed a lawsuit against the network last year.
Weiss was appointed to the newly-created position of “editor-in-chief” at CBS News in October after billionaire David Ellison—who owns CBS’s parent company Paramount Skydance—acquired Weiss’s news site The Free Press for $150 million.
Ellison’s acquisition of Paramount was approved by the Trump administration after Paramount paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit he brought against 60 Minutes over the show’s editing of an interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Paramount is currently making a hostile takeover bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, with David’s father, Larry Ellison, guaranteeing $40.4 billion of equity financing for the company’s offer. This comes after rival company Netflix struck a deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for $72 billion.
David Ellison has reportedly been trying to court President Trump to support Paramount’s bid, although Trump complained on Truth Social last week about 60 Minutes coverage of him.
“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,” Trump said.
Earlier this month, Weiss hosted a town hall event with Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk, highlighting the newsroom’s right-wing shift in content. CBS News then announced its creatively titled “Things That Matter” town hall series sponsored by Bank of America, which is set to feature Vice President JD Vance, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore.
The Erika Kirk interview appears to have been a ratings flop, however, with numbers showing an 11% decrease in viewership compared to the network’s standard programming year-over-year, and a 41% decrease among the coveted advertising demographic of viewers aged 25 to 54; this may be a sign of viewers’ reaction to Weiss’s changes at CBS News.
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