CECOT 60 Minutes segment on El Salvador prison dropped after network says it needed ‘additional reporting,’ days after Trump denied closeness to CBS

CBS News has pulled a planned 60 Minutes segment that examined the Trump administration’s deportation of migrants to a high-security prison in El Salvador, announcing just hours before broadcast that the report would air at a later date. “The broadcast lineup for tonight’s edition of 60 Minutes has been updated. Our report ‘Inside CECOT’ will air in a future broadcast,” the network said in a statement on Sunday evening.


CBS News had announced the segment on the 60 Minutes schedule last week. According to a portion of the script released earlier, the report focused on Venezuelan nationals who believed they were being deported back to their home country but instead were sent to El Salvador’s notorious maximum-security prison, CECOT.


According to a CBS News spokesperson, the episode “needed additional reporting,” Dylan Byers of Puck News reported.


“A group of Venezuelans thought they would be deported from the United States back to their country. But they ended up in CECOT, the notorious maximum-security prison in El Salvador, where they were handcuffed and exposed before the cameras. This Sunday, two of them recount on 60 Minutes what they describe as four months of hell,” according to a portion of the now-deleted show.

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US President Donald Trump has repeatedly accused 60 Minutes of bias against him and reacted sharply to the network in a social media post earlier this month.

“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!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Tuesday, December 16.


Trump’s criticism of the long-running news program follows a legal dispute last year, when he sued 60 Minutes over edits made to an interview with his 2024 presidential rival, Kamala Harris.