(The Hill) — Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused CBS News of selectively editing footage from her Sunday interview, cutting some of her remarks about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran national who was mistakenly deported and returned to the U.S. to face separate charges.
In a statement on Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security said CBS “deceptively” edited the secretary’s answers, cutting 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 in a statement. “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.”
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CBS News, however, maintains that the interview was edited to fit its allotted time slot in the hourlong broadcast and that the full interview was published online.
“Secretary Noem’s ‘Face The Nation’ interview was edited for time and met all CBS News standards,” a spokesperson for CBS News said in a statement to NewsNation partner The Hill. “The entire interview is publicly available on YouTube, and the full transcript was posted early Sunday morning at CBSNews.com.”
Noem’s accusation is the latest example of the administration’s ongoing feud with CBS and its parent company, Paramount.
Earlier this summer, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit with President Donald Trump over claims the news outlet favorably edited a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent in the 2024 election.
In Noem’s Sunday interview, sections of her responses cut for the live broadcast include allegations against Abrego Garcia that have not been substantiated and which his lawyers deny.
Those include allegations that the Maryland resident “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,” which Noem said in the section of the interview that DHS claims was removed from the live broadcast.
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The DHS statement includes other sections of the CBS interview that reportedly did not air live on Sunday morning.
Earlier this week, attorneys for Abrego Garcia asked a federal judge to issue a gag order against Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi to bar them from making “baseless public attacks” against their client, who faces human smuggling charges stemming from a traffic stop in 2022.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said in a Thursday motion filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee that administration officials have targeted their client since he was released from prison, leveling “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 pushed back against the gag order request.
“If Kilmar Abrego Garcia did not want to be mentioned by the Secretary of Homeland Security, then he should have not entered our country illegally and committed heinous crimes,” a DHS official told The Hill on Friday morning.
“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 continued. “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 added.
Abrego Garcia’s attorneys were told their client could be deported to Uganda, but a federal judge said Monday that the administration is “absolutely forbidden” from removing Abrego Garcia until a hearing is held.
