“60 Minutes” knew that Moussa Diawara, a married father of two featured in its Sunday report, had claimed to be gay on immigration documents in what appeared to be an effort to avoid deportation, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official.
The CBS News program was told about the seemingly fraudulent claims on Diawara’s asylum application two weeks before the segment aired, a DHS spokesperson told The Post on Tuesday.
However, the report did not mention that Diawara, who is married to a woman, cited his alleged homosexuality in 2012 immigration documents as a reason he should not be deported to his native Mali because of potential discrimination.
Instead, “60 Minutes” reported that Diawara said he could not be returned to Mali because he had converted to Christianity and feared religious persecution in the Muslim-majority nation.
A representative for the program did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment Tuesday.
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Diawara was deported to Ghana in July, more than a decade after overstaying a tourist visa and seeking refugee status, which prevented his return to Mali.
After the segment aired, DHS General Counsel James Percival said in an X post that he reviewed Diawara’s immigration file and found that “his claimed reason for fearing Mali was that he is ‘gay,’ just in case you’re wondering how bad the immigration fraud problem is.”
According to an asylum application obtained by Fox News, Diawara—who has a wife and was described by CBS News as a “Texas dad”—wrote that “since I came to the USA I had the possibilities to express my feelings to men without any embarrassment [and] no reserve.”
“Although I was born as a boy, but things appeared differently for me as I was already having female behaviors and feelings,” he wrote. “I was more comfortable being intimate with boys rather than with girls.”
During the segment, Diawara claimed that authorities in Ghana forced him onto a flight to Mali within days of his arrival in the West African country.
“60 Minutes” reported that he later fled Mali and is now living in an undisclosed country.
