White House adviser Stephen Miller called for firing of CBS '60 Minutes' producers over spiked CECOT segment

On December 23, 2025, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller told Fox News that the "60 Minutes" producers who had internally objected to CBS pulling a critical segment should be fired. "Every one of those producers at 60 Minutes engaged in this revolt — fire them. Clean house. Fire them," Miller said. The segment, "Inside CECOT," featured deported Venezuelan men describing torture and abuse at El Salvador's CECOT prison; CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss pulled it roughly three hours before its scheduled Sunday broadcast.

Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi wrote to colleagues that the story was factually correct, had been cleared by CBS's lawyers, and that pulling it was "not an editorial decision, it is a political one." Weiss, who was installed atop CBS News as part of the Trump administration-approved Paramount-Skydance merger, defended the decision to staff, writing that most Americans' distrust of the press "isn't because they're crazy." The segment leaked online amid the ensuing backlash, and Miller's call for the objecting producers' firing was widely shared, including by other Trump advisers.

The episode drew a direct line from a White House official's public demand to punish journalists specifically for pushing back, inside their own newsroom, against a decision to kill a lawyer-cleared story critical of the administration's deportation practices.

Updates

2026-01-18 — CBS aired the previously spiked "Inside CECOT" segment [4][5]

"60 Minutes" broadcast the "Inside CECOT" segment roughly four weeks after Bari Weiss had pulled it, despite Miller's public call for the objecting producers to be fired; no firings of the objecting producers were reported.