DHS General Counsel Opened Moussa Diawara’s File and Found the One Detail 60 Minutes Buried

60 Minutes seized on a sobbing sixteen year old named Corey Diawara begging America to believe his father was innocent.

Then the Department of Homeland Security quietly opened his father's actual immigration file.

What investigators found inside that file is nothing like the story Corey told on television.

What James Percival Found When He Pulled the File

CBS aired the segment on October 25, 2026, framing Moussa Diawara as a wrongly deported father.

Diawara lived in the Houston area for more than 25 years after entering the country on a tourist visa and overstaying it.

He married a U.S. citizen, raised two children, and drove for Uber.

He told 60 Minutes that ICE agents denied him access to a lawyer or a judge before his removal.

His son Corey said, "It feels really empty without him," and insisted his father had no criminal record.

60 Minutes leaned hard on a 2012 immigration judge's ruling that blocked Diawara's deportation to Mali.

The network framed his persecution claim around a conversion to Christianity in a majority-Muslim country as the reason he feared going back.

DHS General Counsel James Percival pulled the actual file and told a very different version of events.

He dismissed Diawara as an illegal alien and said the documented reason for fearing Mali was that Diawara claimed to be gay, not Christian.

Percival said the file is proof of "how bad the immigration fraud problem is."

ICE detained Diawara on July 11 and placed him on a charter flight that landed first in Ghana.

Ghanaian authorities then sent him onward to Mali, the exact country the 2012 order was meant to block.

DHS says Ghana gave the United States "diplomatic assurances for his safety" before that transfer happened.

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A Pattern Immigration Fraud Investigators Keep Finding

Fabricated persecution claims built around sexual orientation are not some rare, one-off tactic.

A BBC undercover investigation caught advisers in the United Kingdom charging migrants, mostly from Pakistan and Bangladesh, thousands of pounds to coach them into fabricating same-sex relationships for asylum interviews.

That investigation triggered arrests and a crackdown from the UK Home Office.

The U.S. Department of Justice has charged attorneys and case preparers for running that same scheme on American soil.

That is the exact playbook DHS says it found sitting inside Diawara's paperwork.

What 60 Minutes Admitted in Writing

60 Minutes did not just air the segment and walk away.

The network's write-up conceded that "the U.S. had a right to deport him, but not to Mali."

DHS went further in its statement to the network, directly questioning the credibility of Diawara's underlying persecution claim.

A network sitting on that concession and DHS's skepticism had everything it needed to second-guess the segment before it ever aired.

They ran the sob story anyway.

The Judge Corey Never Mentioned On Camera

Nobody disputes that a judge in 2012 shielded Moussa Diawara from deportation to Mali.

The dispute is over which Moussa Diawara that judge believed he was protecting.

The file DHS pulled points to a persecution claim about his sexuality, not his faith.

A segment built entirely on sympathy skipped the one question that actually mattered.

Corey Diawara is sixteen, and nothing here suggests he knew anything beyond what his father told him.

The producers who built a national segment around his tears had Percival's file review and the Ghana-to-Mali timeline both available to them.

They chose the crying teenager over the paperwork anyway.

Sources:

• Rusty Weiss, "Well, That '60 Minutes' Deportation Sob Story Sure Blew Up in a Hurry," RedState, October 26, 2026.
• Brian Lonergan, "60 Minutes Pushes Lies to Derail Trump's Deportation Mandate," The Blaze, 2026.
• James Percival, "Statement on the Moussa Diawara Asylum Claim," X (@DHSGenCounsel), October 26, 2026.
• BBC, "Undercover Investigation Exposes Advisers Coaching Migrants to Fake Gay Asylum Claims," BBC, 2026.
• U.S. Department of Justice, "Attorneys and Case Preparers Charged in Asylum Fraud Scheme," U.S. Department of Justice, 2026.