Despite an eleventh-hour intervention by CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss, a deeply controversial segment attacking President Donald J. Trump’s deportation policies leaked online anyway, proving once again that ideological activists now run America’s legacy newsrooms.
BREAKING:
Here’s the 60 Minutes Segment Trump and CBS News Executives Don’t Want You to See
Video (no paywall): https://t.co/olxQ4mRuZJ pic.twitter.com/F4KjOrOtAJ
— Yashar Ali
(@yashar) December 23, 2025
The nearly 14-minute report, produced by activist correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, was originally scheduled to air Sunday night. Weiss pulled the segment before broadcast, citing incomplete reporting and a lack of critical context. But her authority proved meaningless.
Within hours, the piece was circulating online after it was “mistakenly” uploaded to Canada’s Global TV app, following the Canadian broadcast of 60 Minutes — which notably did not include the segment. By Monday, the damage was done.
Left-wing journalist Yashar Ali eagerly amplified the leak, posting the full video to his blog and promoting it across social media under the breathless headline: “BREAKING: Here’s the 60 Minutes Segment Trump and CBS News Executives Don’t Want You to See”
The segment alleges that illegal aliens deported under the Trump administration were tortured at El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) — a maximum-security prison specifically designed to house some of the Western Hemisphere’s most violent gang members.
Viewers were subjected to graphic, emotional testimony from deportees — presented as sympathetic victims — without meaningful discussion of why they were deported or who they were allegedly associated with.
“There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves,” claimed one deported illegal.
Another alleged: “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.”
A third added:
“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.”
What the segment failed to mention was just as important as what it showed. There was little to no explanation of Tren de Aragua, the notoriously brutal Venezuelan gang tied to many of the deportees — a criminal organization widely described as “MS-13 on steroids.” Instead, Alfonsi centered the story around a so-called Venezuelan college student, a glaring example of cherry-picking designed to cast mass deportations as indiscriminate cruelty rather than a public-safety policy.
Behind the scenes, Weiss attempted to do what editors are supposed to do: demand more reporting and balance. In a memo to CBS staff obtained by Axios, she explained why the segment was pulled: “The data we present paints an incongruent picture. Of the 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, we say nearly half have no criminal histories. In other words, more than half do have criminal histories.” Weiss added: “My general view here is that we do our viewers the best service by presenting them with the full context they need to assess the story. In other words, I believe we need to do more reporting here.”
That was apparently unacceptable to the newsroom’s activist class.
Alfonsi responded by blasting her own boss in a leaked email to colleagues, accusing Weiss of making “a political one” rather than a journalistic decision — the now-standard charge anytime an editor refuses to greenlight left-wing advocacy masquerading as news. “Inmates Running the Asylum”
Conservative media watchdogs weren’t surprised. “Inmates running the asylum at CBS News,” NewsBusters Managing Editor Curtis Houck wrote on X. “The 60 Minutes crew having the CENCOT piece still air in Canada shows that.” “They don’t respect Bari Weiss and the Ellisons and think they can force her hand,” Houck added.
His warning was blunt: “Hopefully Bari has learned from Chris Licht and not suffered the same fate.” Licht, of course, was the former CNN executive who tried — and failed — to rein in activist employees before being shown the door.
