"When you ship human beings into a place built for cruelty, you own the cruelty"

 

Let’s be clear: this IS Trump’s immigration machine — and just because the torture is on foreign soil doesn’t wash the blood off American hands. This report wasn’t meant to be seen. Inside CECOT, a vetted 60-Minutes investigation, was yanked hours before broadcast and later leaked online anyway. So, what exactly didn’t they want us to know?

They didn’t want ordinary people to connect the simplest dots: when you ship human beings into a place built for cruelty, you own the cruelty. The leaked reporting centers on testimony that reads like a history lesson we were promised would never repeat. People describe being beaten routinely, forced into stress positions, thrown into dark cells, and treated like their bodies are just objects to move, bend, break.

In the leaked video clip circulating, one detainee says: “After they locked us in, they came to beat us every half hour.” That’s not “detention.” That’s a gulag with better lighting. And here’s the part that needs to be said in plain language:

If you know a place tortures people and you send people there anyway, THEN YOU ARE HELPING TORTURE HAPPEN. It doesn’t matter if the fist belongs to a foreign guard. The decision belongs to us. That’s what “outsourcing brutality” means.

One of the men reported on by Reuters is Andrés Guillermo Morales, a Colombian Venezuelan migrant with no criminal record who had no gang ties at all. He was deported anyway, reportedly flagged based on vague and disputed indicators like tattoos, and sent straight into El Salvador’s CECOT prison without a trial.

Once inside, that innocence meant nothing — Morales was subjected to the same beatings, isolation, and dehumanization described by other detainees, because in that system there is no mechanism to correct mistakes once the U.S. hands someone over.

This is also why the censorship matters. According to multiple reports, CBS’s new leadership pushed to hold the segment back, with internal conflict over demands for additional on-camera responses from Trump officials — even after the story team had pursued comment.

The correspondent reportedly called the move political, not editorial. You don’t have to love the media to understand the incentive here: powerful people don’t want a mainstream broadcast putting America’s fingerprints on a human-rights horror show.

So ask your conservative neighbors and friends something simple, without yelling: Are you okay with “border security” that relies on sending people into a prison system that tortures and beats innocent people? If the answer is yes, at least be honest about what you’re defending.

Because if we let this story be buried, we’re not just losing a TV segment. We’re normalizing a policy that will be remembered the way we remember the worst chapters — with the same question hanging over it: Who knew, and stayed quiet?