While the furor over CBS News’ decision to delay a planned “60 Minutes” report about deportees sent by the Trump administration to a notorious Salvadoran prison continued Monday, the intended segment was already circulating online, having been streamed in Canada.
The report, titled “Inside CECOT,” was streamed by Canada’s Global Television Network. In the U.S., its broadcast was postponed by CBS under its new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss.
It includes interviews from people who were deported from the U.S. to the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, or CECOT, under the Trump administration. The interviewees described torture and physical and sexual abuse at the complex.
“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,” Luis Munoz Pinto, a college student in Venezuela who went to the U.S. to seek asylum, told the TV news magazine.
Inmates allegedly linked to criminal organizations are lined up by guards in their cells in El Salvador's CECOT prison in March. Salvadoran Government via Getty Images file
“He said, ‘Welcome to hell. I’ll make sure you never leave,’” said Munoz, who the report noted has since been released.
He told the program that he was awaiting a decision on his asylum claim when he was deported to CECOT this year — one of 252 Venezuelans sent there between March and April.
Neither CBS nor Global Television Network immediately responded to respective requests for comment late Monday and early Tuesday.
The segment featured a clip of President Donald Trump describing El Salvador’s prisons as “great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don’t play games,” while seated next to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele during a meeting at the White House earlier this year. It also showed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s visit to CECOT in March in which she thanked Bukele and El Salvador for their “partnership” with the U.S. to incarcerate what she called “terrorists” at the facility.
Neither the White House nor the Department of Homeland Security immediately responded outside regular business hours early Tuesday to emailed requests for comment about the contents of the segment that aired in Canada.
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