Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused CBS News of editing her Sunday interview in a misleading way. She says the network cut some of her comments about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who was mistakenly deported and later returned to the U.S. to face separate charges.
In a statement on Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said CBS “deceptively” edited about four minutes from the nearly 17-minute interview when it aired on CBS News’s Face the Nation.
“This morning, I joined CBS to report the facts about Kilmar Abrego Garcia,” Noem said. “Instead, CBS shamefully edited the interview to whitewash the truth about this MS-13 gang member and the threat he poses to American public safety.”
CBS News said the interview was edited only to fit its time slot and that the full interview is available online.
“Secretary Noem’s ‘Face The Nation’ interview was edited for time and met all CBS News standards,” a CBS News spokesperson said. “The entire interview is publicly available on YouTube, and the full transcript was posted early Sunday morning at CBSNews.com.”
Noem’s claim adds to the ongoing tensions between the administration and CBS and its parent company, Paramount.
Earlier this summer, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit with President Trump over claims that the network edited a 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent in the 2024 election.
In Noem’s Sunday interview, parts of her comments that were cut include serious allegations against Abrego Garcia, which his lawyers deny. These claims include that he “was a known human smuggler, MS-13 gang member, an individual who was a wife beater, and someone who was so perverted that he solicited nude photos from minors and even his fellow human traffickers told him to knock it off.”
The DHS statement also listed other parts of the CBS interview that did not air live on Sunday.
Earlier this week, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers asked a federal judge to issue a gag order against Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi. They want to prevent the officials from making “baseless public attacks” against their client, who faces human smuggling charges from a traffic stop in 2022.
The lawyers said in a Thursday motion filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee that officials have targeted their client since his release from prison, making “highly prejudicial, inflammatory and false statements.”
“To safeguard his right to a fair trial, Mr. Abrego respectfully renews his earlier requests that the Court order that all DOJ and DHS officials involved in this case, and all officials in their supervisory chain, including [Bondi and Noem], refrain from making extrajudicial comments that pose a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing this proceeding,” the attorneys said in a 15-page motion to U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw.
A DHS official disagreed with the gag order request.
“If Kilmar Abrego Garcia did not want to be mentioned by the Secretary of Homeland Security, then he should not have entered our country illegally and committed heinous crimes,” the official told The Hill on Friday.
“Once again, the media is falling all over themselves to defend this criminal illegal MS-13 gang member who is an alleged human trafficker, domestic abuser, and child predator,” the DHS official added. “The media’s sympathetic narrative about this criminal illegal alien has completely fallen apart, yet they continue to peddle his sob story.”
“We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims,” the official said.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers were told he could be deported to Uganda, but a federal judge said Monday that the administration is “absolutely forbidden” from removing him until a hearing is held.
