The Department of Homeland Security has pushed back on a CBS News “60 Minutes” segment about a deported Mali national, saying the program left out a key detail from the man’s immigration file: a past asylum claim that he was gay.
Moussa Diawara, a married father of two, was deported to Ghana in July. He had overstayed a tourist visa more than a decade earlier and had claimed refugee status that, according to the “60 Minutes” profile, barred him from being sent back to his home country of Mali.
DHS General Counsel James Percival disputed the framing of the segment in a post on X after it aired.
“This illegal alien is [60 Minutes’] poster child for what it claims are wrongful deportations,” Percival wrote.
Percival said he reviewed Diawara’s immigration file and found that his original basis for seeking asylum was a claim that he is gay, despite being married to a woman with whom he has two children.
“[H]is claimed reason for fearing Mali was that he is ‘gay,’ just in case you’re wondering how bad the immigration fraud problem is,” Percival wrote.
DHS said Diawara was granted a final order of removal by a judge in 2012. The department said on X that it removed him to a third country, Ghana, which had provided diplomatic assurances for his safety, and said “60 Minutes” left this “absurd bit of fraud” out of its segment on the case.
According to Diawara’s asylum application, obtained by Fox News, he wrote that “since I came to the USA I had the possibilities to express my feelings to men without any embarrassment no reserve.” He also wrote, “Although I was born as a boy, but things appeared differently for me as I was already having female behaviors and feelings. I was more comfortable being intimate with boys rather than with girls.”
In the “60 Minutes” segment, Diawara alleged that within days of arriving in Ghana, authorities there forced him onto a flight to Mali. CBS News reported that he was homeless and hiding in Mali, fearing for his safety, when the network caught up with him in August. The outlet said he was able to escape to another country with the help of local truckers after several weeks in Mali, and that Diawara asked for that country’s name to be withheld out of concern for his safety.
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