The Department of Homeland Security is pushing back on a CBS News “60 Minutes” segment about a deported Texas man, saying the network omitted a key detail from his immigration case: that he had sought protection from deportation by claiming he feared persecution in Mali because he is gay.
The segment, which aired Sunday, featured the wife and two children of Moussa Diawara, a Malian national who was deported in July. “It feels really empty without him,” his son Corey Diawara told CBS News.
In its coverage, 60 Minutes described Diawara as “a Texas father who had lived in the U.S. for 25 years with no criminal record” who was detained by immigration agents while finishing a night shift as an Uber driver. The network said Diawara was deported without being able to speak to his lawyer or a judge, first sent to Ghana, then to Mali, despite a prior ruling by a U.S. immigration judge that he could not be deported to Mali due to likely persecution there.
According to DHS, that persecution claim rested on an assertion that Diawara feared harm in Mali because he is homosexual. Diawara is married to a woman and has two children.
CBS News reported that Diawara entered the United States on a tourist visa, overstayed it, and later applied for refugee protection on the grounds that he would be persecuted if returned to Mali, citing his conversion to Christianity in a Muslim-majority country with an Islamist insurgency. The network noted he has no criminal record.
Fox News separately obtained documentation showing Diawara’s application for refugee status was based on claimed homosexuality. In the application, Diawara wrote that he had “female behaviors and feelings” and “was more comfortable being intimate with boys rather than with girls.”
“Since I came to the USA I had the possibilities to express my feelings to men without any embarrassment no reserve,” Diawara wrote in his application, according to Fox News.
ICE has publicly accused Diawara of immigration fraud over the discrepancy between his asylum claim and his family life, posting on X that his “asylum application surfaced, revealing that he claimed to be a HOMOSEXUAL man who feared persecution in Mali.”
CBS News’ report did not mention the sexuality-based claim in Diawara’s application, instead framing the story around his family’s loss and questions about how the deportation was carried out.
