Moussa Diawara, a 57-year-old man from Mali who overstayed a tourist visa 25 years ago, was 60 Minutes' poster child for wrongful deportation. He drove for Uber. He had a U.S. citizen wife and two kids. He'd been granted withholding of removal by an immigration judge back in 2012. CBS correspondent Gianna Toboni flew the story under the headline "Destination: Nowhere" and let the audience fill in the rest.
Then DHS General Counsel James Percival released the full interview footage. Turns out 60 Minutes had done some editing.
The segment that aired on Sunday showed Toboni pressing Percival with statistics designed to frame ICE deportees as harmless. "0.5 percent were accused or convicted of homicide. 1.4 percent were accused or convicted of sexual assault," she told him on camera. A combined 1.9 percent. The implication was clear — the other 98 percent are law-abiding people minding their own business.
Percival wasn't having it. "Should that be the limit of who has to follow the law?" he fired back. "Just rapists and murderers have to follow the law?"
That exchange made the broadcast. What didn't make it was Percival dismantling the entire framework Toboni was using. "It's an incredibly misleading label," he said of the "violent crime" classification. "There are many horrible, horrible crimes that people do not classify as violent crimes." He named two: child pornography possession and heroin trafficking. Neither one qualifies as "violent" under the statistical categories Toboni was citing. Both would earn you a cell in any functioning country.
The cutting-room floor held more than that. Percival pointed out that Diawara — the sympathetic Uber driver 60 Minutes built an entire segment around — had originally claimed asylum on the basis that he was gay and feared persecution in Mali. The aired segment mentioned his conversion to Christianity instead. Percival posted the receipts on social media afterward: "This illegal alien is their poster child for what it claims are wrongful deportations. His claimed reason for fearing Mali was that he is 'gay.'"
Diawara is married to a woman with two children.
The timeline matters. Diawara was arrested on July 11, 2026, detained for three weeks without access to a lawyer or judge, and deported to Ghana on July 31. Ghana sent him to Mali within five days — the exact country his 2012 withholding order said he couldn't be returned to. Toboni framed this as a bureaucratic horror story. Percival framed it as the system finally working after 25 years of an overstayed tourist visa.
"Every illegal alien crime is a preventable crime," Percival said in the full interview. That line didn't make the broadcast either.
Toboni tried another angle during the sit-down: "What our reporting also reveals though is that a lot of these people are nurses. They're moms. They're Uber drivers." It's the same argument every time — find the most sympathetic individual, zoom in until the policy disappears, and dare anyone to defend the law while a mother is crying on camera.
Percival's response cut through it: "We have laws, Congress passes those laws, we just enforce them."
The numbers behind the segment tell a different story than the one CBS wanted. ICE made 393,000 arrests between January 21, 2025, and January 31, 2026. Nearly one million people have been deported during the first 18 months of Trump's second term. Roughly 25,000 went to third countries. Of the 63 people on Diawara's deportation flight, 19 percent had criminal records. CBS found 17 of 19 people it contacted from that flight who reported the same experience as Diawara.
So 60 Minutes aired an hour-long interview trimmed to fit a narrative, built the segment around a man whose asylum claim contradicted his own family situation, used crime statistics that excluded the crimes most people would consider unforgivable, and left every substantive DHS rebuttal on the cutting-room floor.
Percival summed it up himself: "You can kind of see why 60 Minutes left stuff like this on the cutting room floor."
The full unedited interview is on the CBS website. They published it quietly. Percival made sure it wasn't quiet for long.