A transcript of the 60 Minutes segment on CECOT, the notorious prison in El Salvador.
A still from the 60 Minutes segment held by Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News.
On Sunday, the CBS News program 60 Minutes was set to air a report by Sharyn Alfonsi about CECOT, the notorious prison in El Salvador that has housed migrants deported by the Trump administration. At the last moment, this segment was spiked by Bari Weiss, the editor in chief of CBS News. But the segment was mistakenly aired in Canada and is now widely circulating on social media. Senator Elizabeth Warren has advocated the sharing of this segment as in the public interest. Heeding Warren’s call, we are posting a transcript of the program. This segment is not just a news report but now, like the Pentagon Papers, itself newsworthy. In the interest of preserving the public record in this authoritarian moment, this transcript is now a historical document. —Jeet Heer
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 claims 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.
It began as soon as the planes landed. The deportees thought they were heading 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 Muñoz Pinto [speaking in Spanish, translated in voiceover]: 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.
Alfonsi: Did you think you were going to die there?
Pinto: We thought we were already the living dead, honestly.
Alfonsi: We met Luis Muñoz 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 US Customs and Border Protection in California.
During that interview…
Pinto: They just looked at me and told me I was a danger to society.
Alfonsi: You have no criminal record.
Pinto: Nothing. I don’t even… I never even got a traffic ticket.
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Alfonsi: Nevertheless, he was detained by Customs. He says he spent six months locked up in the US 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.
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.
Alfonsi: He says the guards began savagely beating them with their fists and batons.
Tell me about what they did to you personally.
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 was when they broke one of my teeth.
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.
Influencer: As you can see, we’re literally in the middle of the desert.
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 warn CECOT was violating the UN standard for minimum treatment of prisoners, and two years ago, during the Biden administration, the US 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.
Donald Trump: They are great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don’t play games.
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Alfonsi: In March, the US struck a deal to pay El Salvador $4.7 million to house Venezuelan deportees at CECOT.
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.
Alfonsi: The US government said these people are the worst of the worst.
Juan Pappier: These people are migrants, and the sad reality is that the US 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.
Alfonsi: Juan Pappier is a deputy director at the nonprofit 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 US 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 Pappier: We cross-reference federal databases, databases in all 50 states in the United States, and also obtain 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.
Alfonsi: So ICE’s own records said…
Pappier: ICE’s own records say that only 3 percent had been sentenced for a violent or potentially violent crime.
Alfonsi: 60 Minutes reviewed the available ICA data. It confirms the findings of Human Rights Watch. It shows 70 men had pending criminal charges in the US, 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.
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.”
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’s suspected of being gang-related earned four points. The 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.
Sanchez: Yes, because they put a guard there to watch us so that we wouldn’t move.
Alfonsi: What would happen if you… couldn’t make it?
Sanchez: They take us to the island.
Alfonsi: What’s the island?
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.
Pinto: The torture was never ending. They would take you there and beat you for hours and leave you locked in there for days.
Alfonsi: Some of the deportees described being sexually assaulted by the guards.
They were hitting your private parts?
Pinto: Sí.
Alfonsi: With a baton…?
Pinto: No. They tugged at them with their hands.
Alfonsi: They did that to multiple people?
Pinto: To most of us,
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?
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 us.
Alfonsi: So they’re telling the injured prisoners to drink water. The water’s filthy…
Pinto: Super filthy. The sicker and more injured we were, the better it was for them.
Alfonsi: In late March, about 10 days after the first US deportees, arrived, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem toured the prison.
Did they speak to anybody? Any of the prisoners…
Pinto: Never, not with any of the detainees. They never spoke to us. We only saw the cameras.
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.
Alfonsi: And there were men standing behind her, heavily tattooed. Who are those men? Do we know?
Pappier: 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.
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.
Student Researcher A: All the invisible men have either an MS on their chest or 13 or an ES for El Salvador, and all those gangs are associated with El Salvador.
Alfonsi: Not for Venezuelans.
Student Researcher A: Yeah.
Alfonsi: To help verify the deportee 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 those influencers who filmed inside CECOT? One toured an isolation cell.
Influencer: These are the rooms of solitary confinement.
Alfonsi: That match the description of the so-called island where the deportees described being tortured,
Influencer: And they get absolutely nothing to use, to sleep or to rest, just pure concrete.
Alfonsi: A show-and-tell at the armory confirmed CECOT had the weapons the Venezuelans say guards used on them.
Student Researcher B: 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.
Alfonsi: We were showing that off in the videos…
Student Researcher B: And they do that sort of a practice.
Alfonsi: But it was this interview with the prison warden that proved to be most helpful.
Warden: The light system is 24 hours a day.
Student Researcher B: 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.
Alfonsi: Using extreme temperatures or light to disorient inmates is also prohibited under UN 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.
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.
Alfonsi: The Department of Homeland Security declined our request for an interview and preferred 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 US 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.
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