On December 21st, two hours before a segment on the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador was scheduled to air on 60 Minutes, the segment was pulled, without an initial explanation.
In the days that followed, CBS News head Bari Weiss told news employees in statement that “My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason — that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready.”
That characterization of the story was disputed by Sharyn Alfonsi, the veteran 60 Minutes correspondent who reported the segment, who wrote in a private note to CBS colleagues that CBS News pulled the segment for “political” reasons.
The disputed segment finally aired without any prior public notice on Sunday, January 18th and it's notable that the only changes to the story was a new opening narration, and the addition of a lengthy coda from Alfonsi.
Here is a complete transcript of the new piece, with additions highlighted in bold.
Everyone can judge for themselves whether the changes helped the segment, but my reaction is that while nothing that was added is inaccurate, it feels like an attempt to muddy the waters. It's as if a local news station does a piece about your house being robbed, but along with the details of the crime includes a history of the neighborhood you live in and what you had for breakfast the day of the robbery.
Sharyn Alfonsi: You may recall earlier this year when the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelan men to El Salvador, a country most had no connection to. The White House claimed the men were terrorists, part of a violent gang, and invoked a centuries-old wartime power, saying it allowed them to deport some men immediately, without due process, an unusual strategy that sparked an ongoing legal battle. Tonight, you'll hear from some of those men.
They describe torture, sexual and physical abuse inside CECOT, one of El Salvador's harshest prisons, where they say they endured four months of hell.
<Nicholas Maduro, the former president of Venezuela, now sits in a federal jail in New York awaiting trial. After a high stakes raid, the White House touted Maduro's capture as a blow to narco-terrorists, who it says floods U.S. streets with drugs.
The repression of the Maduro regime forced 8 million Venezuelans to flee, nearly one million of them to the United States.
Last year, in the biggest immigration crackdown in U.S. history, hundreds of those Venezuelans were deported to El Salvador, a country most had no connection to. The White House claimed that were part of a violent gang and designated them as terrorists. The Administration invoked a centuries-old wartime power - the Alien Enemies Act - to rapidly deport some of the men. Between March and April of last year, the U.S. sent 252 Venezuelan men to a brutal maximum security prison in El Salvador known as CECOT.
You will hear from two of those men. They describe torture, sexual and physical abuse inside the prison. Since November, 60 Minutes has made several attempts to interview key Trump Administration officials on camera about our story. They have declined our request.
Tonight, our report from inside CECOT.>
It began as soon as the planes landed. The deportees thought they were headed back to Venezuela, but then saw hundreds of Salvadoran police waiting for them on the tarmac.
Shackled, they were paraded in front of cameras, pushed onto buses, and delivered to CECOT, El Salvador's notorious maximum security prison.
Luis Munoz Pinto: When we got there, the CECOT director was talking to us. First thing he told us was that we would never see the light of day or night again. He said, welcome to hell.
I'll make sure you never leave.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Did you think you were going to die there?
Luis Munoz Pinto: We thought we were already the living dead, honestly.
Sharyn Alfonsi: We met Luis Munoz Pinto in Colombia. He was a college student in repressive Venezuela and hoped to seek asylum in the United States. In 2024, he says, he waited in Mexico until his scheduled appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in California. During that interview..
Luis Munoz Pinto: He just looked at me and told me I was a danger to society.
Sharyn Alfonsi: You have no criminal record?
Luis Munoz Pinto: I never even got a traffic ticket.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Nevertheless, he was detained by customs.
He says he spent six months locked up in the U.S. waiting for a decision on his asylum case when he was deported. One of 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT between March and April. Inside, he says, their hands and feet were tied.
Forced to their knees, their heads were shaved.
Luis Munoz Pinto: There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn't take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves. When you get there, you already know you're in hell. You don't need anyone else to tell you.
Sharyn Alfonsi: He says the guards began savagely beating them with their fists and batons.
Tell me about what they did to you personally.
Luis Munoz Pinto: Four guards grabbed me. And they beat me until I bled. To the point of agony. They knocked our faces against the wall. That is when they broke one of my teeth.
Sharyn Alfonsi: CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center, was built in 2022.
As a key part of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's sweeping anti-gang crackdown. The massive prison, designed to hold 40,000 inmates and its harsh reputation, are a point of pride for Bukele, who regularly allows social media influencers to tour it.
Unidentified influencer: As you can see, we're literally in the middle of the desert.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Guards show off cramped cells where metal bunks are stacked four high. There are no mattresses or sheets. Inmates said they had no access to the outdoors and no contact with relatives.
International observers warned CECOT was violating the U.N. standard for minimum treatment of prisoners. And two years ago, during the Biden administration, the U.S. State Department cited torture and life-threatening prison conditions in its report on El Salvador. But this year, during a meeting with President Bukele at the White House, President Trump expressed admiration for El Salvador's prison system.
President Donald Trump: They're great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don't play games.
Sharyn Alfonsi: In March, the U.S. struck a deal to pay El Salvador $4.7 million to house Venezuelan deportees at CECOT.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: These are heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators, who have no right to be in this country and they must be held accountable.
Sharyn Alfonsi: The U.S. government said these people are the worst of the worst.
Juan Papier: These people are migrants. And the sad reality is that the U.S. government tried to make an example out of them. They sent them to a place where they were likely to be tortured to send migrants across Latin America the message that they should not come to the United States.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Juan Papier is a deputy director at the non-profit Human Rights Watch. In an 81-page report released in November, the organization concluded there was systematic torture and other abuses at CECOT, and that nearly half of the Venezuelans the U.S. sent there had no criminal history. Only eight of the men had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense.
How do you know they weren't gang members?
Juan Papier: We cross-referenced federal databases, databases in all 50 states in the United States, and also obtained criminal records in Venezuela and in the countries where these people live. And the information we obtained in the United States is based on data provided by ICE.
Sharyn Alfonsi: So ICE's own records said...
Juan Papier: ICE's own records say that only 3% had been sentenced for a violent or potentially violent crime.
Sharyn Alfonsi: 60 Minutes reviewed the available ICE data. It confirms the findings of Human Rights Watch. It shows 70 men had pending criminal charges in the U.S., which could include immigration violations. We don't know because the Department of Homeland Security has never released a complete list of the names or criminal histories of the men it sent to CECOT.
Rapid deportations have been a key part of the Trump administration's immigration overhaul. The administration considers anyone who crosses the border illegally to be a criminal.
Illegal crossings are now at a historic low. But some immigration attorneys say the administration has used flawed criteria to justify deportations.
Luis Munoz Pinto: I have some tattoos. None of them have anything to do with any criminal group. I explained to them, saying that I didn't belong to any gang, to which the agent responded, but you are Venezuelan.
Sharyn Alfonsi: 60 Minutes reviewed this document agents used to assess Venezuelans. A person with eight points was designated as a Tren de Aragua gang member and deportable. Tattoos an immigration officer suspected of being gang-related earned four points.
But criminologists who study gangs say tattoos are not a reliable way to identify Venezuelan gang members because, unlike some Central American gangs, such as MS-13, Tren de Aragua does not use tattoos to signal membership.
Venezuelan national William Lozada Sanchez was also deported to CECOT. He told us the guards there also accused Venezuelans with tattoos of being gang members.
He detailed months of abuse and being forced into stress positions.
So you had to be on your knees for 24 hours?
William Lozada Sanchez: Yes, because they put a guard there to watch us so that we wouldn't move.
Sharyn Alfonsi: What would happen if you couldn't make it?
William Lozada Sanchez: They'd take us to the island.
Sharyn Alfonsi: What's the island?
William Lozada Sanchez: The island is a little room where there's no light, no ventilation, nothing. 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.
Luis Munoz Pinto: The torture was never-ending. Interminable. They would take you there and beat you for hours and leave you locked in there for days.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Some of the deportees described being sexually assaulted by the guards.
They were hitting your private parts? With a baton?
Luis Munoz Pinto: No, they targeted them with their hands.
Sharyn Alfonsi: And they did that to multiple people?
Luis Munoz Pinto: To most of us.
Sharyn Alfonsi: The men say they grew weaker by the day. They claim the prison lights were left on 24 hours a day, making it difficult to sleep. And that food and medicine were often withheld.
Did you have access to clean water?
Luis Munoz Pinto: They never gave us access to clean water. The same water from our baths and toilets was the same water that we had to drink and survive on. If we had serious injuries, when the doctors examined us, they told us that drinking water would heal it.
Sharyn Alfonsi: So they're telling the injured prisoners to drink water and the water's filthy?
Luis Munoz Pinto: Super filthy. The sicker and more injured we were, the better it was for them.
Sharyn Alfonsi: In late March, about 10 days after the first U.S. deportees arrived, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem toured the prison. Did they speak to anybody? Any of the prisoners?
Luis Munoz Pinto: Never. Not with any of the detainees. They never spoke to us.
We only saw the cameras.
Sharyn Alfonsi: At some point, Secretary Noem went to another area of the prison to record this video.
Kristi Noem: I want to thank El Salvador and their president for their partnership with the United States of America to bring our terrorists here and to incarcerate them.
Sharyn Alfonsi: There were men standing behind her, heavily tattooed. Who are those men? Do we know?
William Lozada Sanchez: We know that those men in her video are not Venezuelans. They are Salvadorians, probably accused of being gang leaders, and probably people who have been in jail for many, many years in El Salvador.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Human Rights Watch was able to confirm that with the help of this intrepid team of students at UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center.
Unidentifed speaker: All the visible men have either an MS on their chest or a 13 or an ES for El Salvador, and all those gangs are associated with El Salvador. Not the Venezuelans.
Sharyn Alfonsi: To help verify the deportees' stories for Human Rights Watch, the team of students combed through open source data for weeks. Students are trained in advanced techniques and follow strict international standards for obtaining digital evidence that can be used in courts. Analyzing satellite imagery, they mapped the prison and identified the building where the Venezuelans were held.
And remember all of those influencers who filmed inside CECOT? One toured an insolation cell.
Unidentified influencer: And they get absolutely nothing to use to sleep or to rest. Just pure cockroach.
Sharyn Alfonsi: It matched a description of so-called "Island" where the deportees described being tortured.
A show-and-tell of the armory confirmed CECOT had the weapons the Venezuelans say guards used on them.
Unidentified investigator: What we did see in these videos was the use of the T-batons on prisoners. Additionally, we also saw the use of painful body positions. We were showing that off in the videos.
And they do that in sort of a practice.
Sharyn Alfonsi: But it was this interview with the prison warden that proved to be most helpful.
Prison Warden: The light system is 24 hours a day.
Unidentified investigator: One of the questions that we had was, are the lights on 24-7? He said, yes, they are.
So he's talking about how hot it can get in the prison. So there's this sort of pride around the poor conditions and around the suffering.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Using extreme temperatures or light to disorient inmates is also prohibited under U.N. standards.
Alexa Koenig: I think one of the things that the work of this team has really shown is that a lot of these stories can be believed.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Alexa Koenig is the director of Berkeley's Investigations Lab, which trains students to research war crimes and human rights violations.
Alexa Koenig: And it's those little details that I think then, if you can bring that together with the physical evidence, I think you have the strongest possible case for accountability, whether it's a court of public opinion or at some point in a court of law.
Sharyn Alfonsi: The Department of Homeland Security declined our request for an interview and referred all questions about CECOT to El Salvador. The government there did not respond to our request.
In July, after four months, the 252 Venezuelan men were finally released from CECOT and sent back to Caracas in exchange for 10 Americans that had been imprisoned in Venezuela.
The Trump administration has arranged more deals, some valued at millions of dollars, to offload U.S. deportees to other so-called third countries, nations to which they have no connection. Among them, war-torn South Sudan and Uganda, which have well-documented histories of torturing prisoners.
<60 Minutes has repeatedly asked The Department Of Homeland Security for the complete records and criminal backgrounds of all 252 Venezuelan men the U.S. sent to CECOT. It would not provide them.
This past week, DHS told us "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. That would be insane. "
Because of this, we relied on the ICE data that is available for our reporting. Of the 252 men, that data shows that 33 had been convicted of a crime in the U.S. Again, eight of them for violent or potentially violent crimes. Another 70 had pending charges, although we don't know the nature of those charges because DHS refuses to share that information.
Neither of the two detainees in our story has been convicted of any crime in the U.S. Nine days ago, DHS sent 60 Minutes a photo of William Lozado's left arm, with a swastika tattoo. In an interview in November, this is what his arm looked like. He told is that he got the offensive tattoo at 15 and didn't know what it meant. He claimed he regretted it and got it changed just before the U.S. sent him to CECOT.
Five gang experts told us that swastikas and "666," another tattoo on Lozada's arm, have no connection to the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua,
In a statement to 60 Minutes, the White House said "President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people by removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegal aliens."
The Administration's statements are available in full online.
DHS deflected all allegations of abuse at CECOT, saying the men were "not under U.S. jurisdiction" while they were in El Salvador. But last month, a federal judge ruled the U.S. had maintained what is called "constructive custody" over the Venezuelans who were sent to CECOT under the Aliens Enemies Act. He ordered the Trump Administration to give those men the due process they were denied.
In a declaration to the courts, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained in part that bringing the Venezuelans to the U.S. for hearings or do virtual hearings would risk, quote, "material damage to U.S. foreign policy interests in Venezuela.">