The Department of Homeland Securitys top lawyer has publicly challenged CBSs 60 Minutes over what he says was a selectively edited segment designed to cast lawful deportations as cruel and unjust, releasing uncut footage and asylum records that sharply undercut the networks narrative.
According to RedState, DHS General Counsel James Percival this week published extended portions of his 60 Minutes interview, along with key documents from the immigration file of a Houston-area man whose removal CBS framed as an emblem of heartlessness in the Trump administrations enforcement agenda. The broadcast centered on 57-year-old Moussa Diawara, a native of Mali who overstayed a tourist visa and remained in the United States for more than a quarter-century, marrying a U.S. citizen, fathering two children, and working as an Uber driver in Texas.
In 2012, an immigration judge granted Diawara withholding of removal to Mali, a form of protection short of full asylum, after he claimed he would face persecution if returned to the Muslim-majority country. The 60 Minutes piece emphasized that his alleged fear stemmed from his conversion to Christianity, portraying him as a peaceful family man with deep roots in the Houston area and no criminal record.
The program further highlighted the emotional toll on his family after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) placed him on a flight in July to Ghana, which had provided diplomatic assurances but later transferred him on to Mali. It feels really empty without him, says 16-year-old Corey Diawara, whose father was deported in July.
His son told the program that his father had lived in the United States for 25 years and had no criminal record, a detail clearly intended to reinforce the image of a benign, law-abiding immigrant swept up in a harsh dragnet. Moussa Diawara says he was deported without being able to speak to his lawyer or a judge, a claim that 60 Minutes allowed to stand as part of its broader critique of the administrations enforcement posture.
After the segment aired, Percival said he reviewed Diawaras immigration file and discovered that the basis for his original fear claim was not religious conversion but sexual orientation. The asylum application, Percival revealed, stated that Diawara was gay and feared persecution in Mali on that ground, even though he is married to a woman and has two children.
This illegal alien is [60 Minutes] poster child for what it claims are wrongful deportations, Percival wrote in a post accompanying the documents. His claimed reason for fearing Mali was that he is gay, just in case youre wondering how bad the immigration fraud problem is.
Percivals decision to release the uncut interview and underlying records was clearly aimed at exposing what he and many conservatives see as a pattern of media outlets sanitizing or omitting facts that complicate sympathetic portrayals of people in the country illegally. Separately, Percival posted several clips from his exchange with CBS that never made it to air, including a pointed discussion of how crime statistics are framed to minimize the public-safety threat posed by some illegal aliens.
In one such exchange, a 60 Minutes correspondent cited internal DHS figures indicating that less than 14 percent of recent ICE detainees had violent criminal records, a statistic the program used to suggest that the Trump administration was targeting mostly non-violent individuals. Percival pushed back forcefully, arguing that the violent label is deeply misleading because many grave offenses including possession of child sexual abuse material and heroin trafficking are not categorized as violent crimes under standard definitions.
DHS General Counsel James Percival SHUTS DOWN 60 Minutes for trying to claim the Trump admin isnt deporting the worst of the worst: 60 Minutes: Less than 14% of people detained by ICE had a violent criminal record. Percival: Its an incredibly misleading label. There are many horrible, HORRIBLE crimes that people do not classify as violent crimes. Let me give you some examples. Child pornography [] watching it is not considered a violent crime. Trafficking in heroin, not considered a violent crime. So anytime someone feeds you a violent crime stat like that, they are absolutely COOKING THE BOOKS to erase the significant criminality and public safety threat.
The embedded clip continued with Percival underscoring that there are many horrible, HORRIBLE crimes that people do not classify as violent crimes, reiterating that child pornography [] watching it is not considered a violent crime and trafficking in heroin, not considered a violent crime. He warned that anytime someone feeds you a violent crime stat like that, they are absolutely COOKING THE BOOKS to erase the significant criminality and public safety threat, a blunt accusation that CBS chose not to broadcast in its primetime segment.
From Percivals perspective, the core issue is not merely how crimes are labeled but whether the federal government has the will to remove individuals who have no legal right to be in the country and then commit additional offenses. He argued that any crime committed by someone present illegally is, by definition, a preventable crime, and he contrasted the Trump administrations approach with what he described as the lax enforcement of prior administrations that declined to remove such individuals at remotely comparable rates.
In a separate commentary, Percival made his position even more explicit, rejecting the notion that there is such a thing as a good illegal alien. I reiterate ALL illegal aliens are bad actors.
Breaching a nation's sovereign borders is often a gateway to other crimes, he added, encapsulating a view widely held on the right that unlawful entry itself reflects a disregard for the rule of law that frequently manifests in further violations. That perspective stands in stark contrast to the framing favored by many in the legacy media, who routinely depict illegal border crossers as merely seeking a better life and treat enforcement as inherently suspect or cruel.
Another portion of the uncut interview, also omitted from the original 60 Minutes broadcast, showed Percival pressing the correspondent on whether individuals who commit only so-called lesser offenses should still be subject to removal. The exchange laid bare a fundamental divide: CBS appeared intent on drawing a bright line around only the most heinous crimes, while Percival insisted that the law applies to all who violate immigration statutes, not just to murderers and rapists.
CBS News national correspondent Gianna Toboni entered the interview armed with internal DHS numbers and, evidently, a pre-written narrative that only a small fraction of those being deported were truly the worst of the worst. She appeared confident that the statistics would bolster the case that the Trump administration was casting too wide a net, sweeping up mostly non-violent offenders and long-term residents like Diawara.
Until it all imploded. "Based on the internal DHS document, in [President] Trump's first year, 0.5 percent of those detained were accused or convicted of homicide," she said, presumably satisfied that she had made a point.
"1.4 percent were accused or convicted of sexual assault. I mean, together that's 2 percent." According to the document obtained by CBS News, ICE made roughly 393,000 arrests between January 21, 2025, and January 31, 2026 President Trumps first year back in office.
1.9 percent of that number means roughly 7,500 illegal aliens detained fall into either the murderer or rapist column. 7,500 violent criminals, gone.
But because Toboni converted it to a percentage, she and her cohorts at 60 Minutes think that's no big deal. How perfectly obtuse.
"Isn't it wonderful that we're getting those people out of the country?" Percival countered, turning the statistic on its head and reframing it as a success story rather than a cause for concern. Yes.
The simple, and only appropriate, response to that question is yes. Toboni replied, "100 percent," conceding the point in principle, but she quickly attempted to pivot with a qualifying but to dilute the impact of the figure.
Percival was not inclined to let that rhetorical maneuver stand, cutting through the equivocation with a question that went to the heart of the rule-of-law debate. "Should that be the limit of who has to follow the law?" he asked.
"Just rapists and murderers have to follow the law?" "Just rapists and murderers have to follow the law?" 60 Minutes conveniently left this conversation with DHS General Counsel James Percival out of their segment on deportations, even though it crystallized the philosophical divide between strict enforcement and the more permissive approach favored by many progressives.
Following the backlash and the release of the uncut material, 60 Minutes has since posted an extended version of the interview online, a tacit acknowledgment that the original edit left out context that viewers might reasonably consider important. The networks aired segment did concede that the United States had a legal right to deport Diawara, though it suggested Washington erred by not sending him directly to Mali which, in fact, it did not and it briefly referenced a DHS statement questioning the credibility of his claims, but without delving into the specifics of the alleged fraud.
The full context of the asylum application, including the discrepancy between Diawaras written claim of being gay and the programs emphasis on his Christian conversion, never appeared in the broadcast version. Nor did the more detailed discussion of how non-violent criminal classifications can obscure serious offenses that pose real dangers to American communities.
In another un-aired clip, Percival defended the practice of sending illegal aliens to third-party countries when their home governments refuse to accept them, describing it as a necessary national security tool to ensure that dangerous individuals are not simply released back into the United States. He argued that such transfers are both lawful and prudent, particularly when dealing with recalcitrant regimes that obstruct repatriation efforts while their nationals continue to commit crimes on American soil.
"You can kind of see why [60 Minutes] left stuff like this on the cutting room floor," he wrote, suggesting that the omitted exchanges undermined the networks preferred storyline of indiscriminate cruelty by immigration authorities. You can kind of see why @60Minutes left stuff like this on the cutting room floor.
For conservatives, the episode is a textbook example of how powerful media institutions can shape public perception by what they choose not to show as much as by what they air. Hey, when you've got a narrative to push that all illegals being deported are just harmless 'Houston or Maryland Men' and that authorities should turn a blind eye to fraud and other "lesser" crimes, then yeah, it's easy to see why 60 Minutes selectively edited the interview the way they did.
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