‘60 Minutes’ Still Frames Deportation as Cruelty, Not Correction

In May 2026, Bari Weiss’s arrival at CBS News was sold as a remedy to the network’s bias. Out went the old guard at 60 Minutes—executive producer Tanya Simon, correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi, Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega, and others whose immigration segments had drawn accusations of selective storytelling. The CECOT episode (on El Salvador’s maximum security Terrorism Confinement Center), which was delayed by internal friction, was Exhibit A. Viewers were told the groundbreaking television news magazine would finally deliver more rigorous, less activist reporting.

A recent segment on removals of illegal aliens to Ghana shows how little has changed.

The broadcast focused on a July 30 flight of 63 deportees from Texas to West Africa. Of the 19 illegals 60 Minutes reached who had been deported to Ghana, 17 said Ghanaian authorities then moved them onward to their countries of origin, places where U.S. immigration judges had previously barred return. The framing was familiar: American immigration policy as the primary cruelty, deportees as victims of bureaucratic heartlessness. The segment minimized the deportees’ criminal records and the alternatives ICE authorities had given them that would have allowed them to avoid a one-way ticket to Ghana.

DHS and ICE responded by releasing their names and the charges the program left on the cutting-room floor. Abdul Jalloh, a violent criminal alien, had stabbed Virginia mother Stephanie Minter to death at a bus stop. He had prior arrests for rape by force, shooting into an occupied building, malicious wounding, and multiple other offenses. Local prosecutors in Fairfax County had repeatedly declined to keep him in custody.