White House officials said a deported dad who featured on 60 Minutes lied about being gay to stay in the United States illegally. Moussa Diawara, 57, from Mali, was deported from Texas on July 30 after over two decades in the US, where he had married and had two children in Houston. Despite having no criminal record, Diawara was subject to a deportation order earlier this year by the Trump administration, who said he had overstayed a tourist visa from when he was 32.
Diawara then applied for refugee protection and argued he would be persecuted if he was sent to Mali, and an immigration judge agreed and ruled that he would instead be sent to Ghana – a country he has no connection to. Within days of his arrival in Mali, Diawara claims that he was then forced onto a flight to Ghana, and he has been left trying to get back to his family in Texas, who told of their anguish to 60 Minutes. The CBS News show aired a gut-wrenching segment this week showing Diawara’s 16-year-old son Corey speaking of how ’empty’ he feels without his father. However, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) alleged after the show that the reason Diawara claimed he would be ‘persecuted’ in Mali was because he claimed to be homosexual, despite being happily married to a woman and having children. ‘You literally cannot make this up,’ ICE wrote in a post on X.
