Bari Weiss vs. Your Eyes: The Segment You Weren’t Supposed to Watch
How CBS tried to hit the kill switch, and the CECOT footage escaped anyway.
What happened, and why this transcript exists
This transcript comes from a 60 Minutes report by correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi focused on Venezuelan men deported by the U.S. to El Salvador’s CECOT prison. The men describe extreme abuse, including beatings, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and sexual assault, alongside reporting that questions whether many of the deportees had the violent criminal histories the U.S. government implied.
The controversy is not only what the segment reports, but what happened right before the public was supposed to see it.
CBS promoted the piece.
Then CBS pulled it hours before broadcast.
The segment then appeared online anyway via Canada’s Global TV streaming app and spread across the internet.
CBS leadership said the story needed additional reporting and more on-camera responses. Alfonsi and members of the 60 Minutes team pushed back, saying the segment had been thoroughly vetted, cleared by lawyers/standards, and that “government silence” shouldn’t function as a veto.
Arrival at CECOT
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): It began as soon as the planes landed. The deportees thought they were headed back to Venezuela, but then saw hundreds of Salvadoran police waiting for them on the tarmac.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): Shackled, they were paraded in front of cameras, pushed onto buses, and delivered to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious maximum security prison.
LUIS MUNOZ PINTO: 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.
LUIS MUNOZ PINTO: I’ll make sure you never leave.
SHARYN ALFONSI: Did you think you were going to die there?
LUIS MUNOZ PINTO: We thought we were already the living dead, honestly.
From asylum appointment to detention
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): We met Luis Munoz 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 U.S. Customs and Border Protection in California.
LUIS MUNOZ PINTO: A man looked at me and told me I was a danger to society.
SHARYN ALFONSI: You had no criminal record?
LUIS MUNOZ PINTO: I never even got a traffic ticket.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): During that interview, nevertheless, he was detained by customs.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): He says he spent six months locked up in the U.S. waiting for a decision on his asylum case when he was deported. One of 252 Venezuelans sent to CICOT between March and April. Inside, he says, their hands and feet were tied.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): Forced to their knees, their heads were shaved.
Allegations of abuse inside
LUIS MUNOZ 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.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): He says the guards began savagely beating them with their fists and batons.
SHARYN ALFONSI: Tell me about what they did to you personally.
LUIS MUNOZ 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 is when they broke one of my teeth.
What CECOT is and how it’s presented
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center, was built in 2022.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): 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.
UNIDENTIFIED INFLUENCER: As you can see, we’re literally in the middle of the desert.
NARRATION (Sharyn 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.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): International observers warned CECOT was violating the U.N. standard for minimum treatment of prisoners. And two years ago, during the Biden administration, the U.S. 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.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They’re great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don’t play games.
The deal, the rhetoric, and what records show
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): In March, the U.S. struck a deal to pay El Salvador $4.7 million to house Venezuelan deportees at CICOT.
WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY 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.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): The U.S. government said these people are the worst of the worst.
JUAN PAPIER: These people are migrants. And the sad reality is that the U.S. 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.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): Juan Papier is a deputy director at the non-profit Human Rights Watch. In an 81-page report released in November, the organization concluded there was systematic torture and other abuses at CICOT, and that nearly half of the Venezuelans the U.S. sent there had no criminal history. Only eight of the men had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense.
SHARYN ALFONSI: How do you know they weren’t gang members?
JUAN PAPIER: We cross-referenced federal databases, databases in all 50 states in the United States, and also obtained 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.
SHARYN ALFONSI: So ICE’s own records said...
JUAN PAPIER: ICE’s own records say that only 3% had been sentenced for a violent or potentially violent crime.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): 60 Minutes reviewed the available ICE data. It confirms the findings of Human Rights Watch. It shows 70 men had pending criminal charges in the U.S., 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.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): 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.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): Illegal crossings are now at a historic low. But some immigration attorneys say the administration has used flawed criteria to justify deportations.
Tattoos and the scoring document
LUIS MUNOZ 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.
NARRATION (Sharyn 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 suspected of being gang-related earned four points.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): But 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.
William Lozada Sanchez and “the island”
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): Venezuelan national William Lozada Sanchez was also deported to CICOT. He told us the guards there also accused Venezuelans with tattoos of being gang members.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): He detailed months of abuse and being forced into stress positions.
SHARYN ALFONSI: So you had to be on your knees for 24 hours?
WILLIAM LOZADA SANCHEZ: Yes, because they put a guard there to watch us so that we wouldn’t move.
SHARYN ALFONSI: What would happen if you couldn’t make it?
WILLIAM LOZADA SANCHEZ: They’d take us to the island.
SHARYN ALFONSI: What’s the island?
WILLIAM LOZADA 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.
LUIS MUNOZ PINTO: The torture was never-ending. Interminable. They would take you there and beat you for hours and leave you locked in there for days.
Sexual assault allegation, sleep, food, and water
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): Some of the deportees described being sexually assaulted by the guards.
SHARYN ALFONSI: They were hitting your private parts? With a baton?
LUIS MUNOZ PINTO: No, they targeted them with their hands.
SHARYN ALFONSI: And they did that to multiple people?
LUIS MUNOZ PINTO: To most of us.
NARRATION (Sharyn 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.
SHARYN ALFONSI: Did you have access to clean water?
LUIS MUNOZ 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 it.
SHARYN ALFONSI: So they’re telling the injured prisoners to drink water and the water’s filthy?
LUIS MUNOZ PINTO: Super filthy. The sicker and more injured we were, the better it was for them.
Noem visit and the cameras
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): In late March, about 10 days after the first U.S. deportees arrived, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem toured the prison.
SHARYN ALFONSI: Did they speak to anybody? Any of the prisoners?
LUIS MUNOZ PINTO: Never. Not with any of the detainees. They never spoke to us.
LUIS MUNOZ PINTO: We only saw the cameras.
NARRATION (Sharyn 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.
SHARYN ALFONSI: There were men standing behind her, heavily tattooed. Who are those men? Do we know?
WILLIAM LOZADA SANCHEZ: 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.
Berkeley verification team and open-source evidence
NARRATION (Sharyn 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.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: All the visible men have either an MS on their chest or a 13 or an ES for El Salvador, and all those gangs are associated with El Salvador. Not the Venezuelans.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): To help verify the deportees’ 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.
UNIDENTIFIED INFLUENCER: And they get absolutely nothing to use to sleep or to rest. Just pure cockroach.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): A show-and-tell of the armory confirmed CICOT had the weapons the Venezuelans say guards used on them.
UNIDENTIFIED INVESTIGATOR: What 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. We were showing that off in the videos.
UNIDENTIFIED INVESTIGATOR: And they do that in sort of a practice.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): But it was this interview with the prison warden that proved to be most helpful.
PRISON WARDEN: The light system is 24 hours a day.
UNIDENTIFIED INVESTIGATOR: One of the questions that we had was, are the lights on 24-7? He said, yes, they are.
UNIDENTIFIED INVESTIGATOR: 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.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): Using extreme temperatures or light to disorient inmates is also prohibited under U.N. 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.
NARRATION (Sharyn 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.
Government response and what happened next
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): The Department of Homeland Security declined our request for an interview and referred all questions about CECOT to El Salvador. The government there did not respond to our request.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): 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.
NARRATION (Sharyn Alfonsi): The Trump administration has arranged more deals, some valued at millions of dollars, to offload U.S. 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.
Epilogue: the fallout (who said what, and how it spread)
The pull
Sunday, Dec 21, 2025: CBS announced the CECOT segment would not air on that night’s U.S. broadcast—roughly two to three hours before airtime, depending on the account.
CBS said the piece was being held for additional reporting and to better incorporate the Trump administration’s response.
Multiple reports describe editor-in-chief Bari Weiss requesting changes late in the process, including more on-camera administration participation.
Inside CBS: newsroom reaction
Sharyn Alfonsi circulated a blunt internal message saying the story had been screened repeatedly, cleared by standards and lawyers, and that pulling it after that vetting felt political, not editorial.
The reaction among journalists described in reporting wasn’t mild annoyance; it was a credibility crisis: veteran staffers questioning what “cleared” means if it can be reversed at the last possible hour.
Weiss, in turn, defended the decision as routine newsroom judgment: holding a story until it’s “ready,” with more context and critical voices.
The public blowback
The decision instantly became bigger than the segment: a debate over whether “balance” had turned into a permission slip for powerful people to delay accountability.
Prominent political figures and media critics publicly questioned CBS’s editorial independence and demanded the segment be aired as originally produced.
The leak and the Streisand effect
Monday, Dec 22–Tuesday, Dec 23, 2025: Canada’s Global TV app briefly made available a version of the episode that still contained the pulled segment.
Viewers downloaded it, reposted clips, and it spread across platforms—YouTube, X, and elsewhere—faster than any press release could contain.
CBS confirmed the online appearance was not authorized and reportedly moved to remove copies, which only amplified the “you weren’t supposed to see this” narrative.
Barry Weiss built a brand off the idea that sunlight is non-negotiable.
So if you were anywhere near the gravity well of a decision that yanked this story from public view at the last possible hour, hear me plain. You do not get to pose as the patron saint of free inquiry while treating human suffering like a programming risk. You do not get to lecture the country about courage and then flinch when the footage has teeth. And you do not get to help drag CBS’s credibility into the ditch and then act surprised when people stop trusting the people who once showed them the truth.
If this transcript matters to you, go paid. Not because I need applause. Because I need leverage. Paid subscriptions are how I keep publishing what gatekeepers try to sand down, slow-walk, or bury. It’s how I keep receipts on the people who think the public can be managed like a focus group.
This is sickening and criminal, no question. Thank you for posting.
Great to read a transcript of the CECOT piece!