The Trump administration disputed 60 Minutes’s characterization of the deportation of a Malian immigrant, saying he was deported for claiming asylum for being gay despite having a wife and two children.
Nearly all public information about Moussa Diawara, 57, comes from the CBS News 60 Minutes report and competing Trump administration claims. Both agree that Diawara came to the United States from Mali when he was 32 on a tourist visa, which he overstayed, then claimed asylum. He married a woman while in the U.S. and has two children with her, ages 16 and 12. A judge ruled in favor of his deportation, but said he couldn’t be deported to Mali over fears of persecution. He was instead deported to Ghana in July and was then deported from there to his native Mali.
What the two accounts differ over is his reasoning for his asylum claim. CBS News claimed his asylum claim rested on his conversion to Christianity, fearing persecution if he was deported to his native Muslim Mali, which is battling an Islamist insurgency.
The Trump administration cited a much different reason, saying he claimed to be gay, despite his marriage to a woman and two children.
“This illegal alien is @60Minutes poster child for what it claims are wrongful deportations. I pulled his file. His claimed reason for fearing Mali was that he is ‘gay,’ just in case you’re wondering how bad the immigration fraud problem is,” Seventh General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security James Percival said on X.
The Department of Homeland Security elaborated on Diawara’s case in a post on X.
“On February 2, 2012, an immigration judge ordered Diawara removed from the United States,” the post said. “Diawara, who is married to a woman he shares 2 children with, oddly claimed he would be persecuted for homosexuality if returned home to Mali, and requested a withholding of removal from his home country. On July 30, he was removed from the United States to a country that provided diplomatic assurances for his safety.”
His reason for asylum wasn’t the only detail disputed between the two. Diawara argued that DHS knew he would be sent from Ghana to Mali all along, showing bag tags from his deportation flight listing Mali as his destination. DHS said this was “FAKE NEWS” and that Diawara misunderstood the process.
“Aliens are correctly removed to the third country that had agreed to accept them,” DHS said in a separate X post. “Those tags were produced by contractors at the detention facility where the aliens were staged, not by the officers executing the removal.”
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“The contractors do not have visibility into third-country removal arrangements and defaulted to the home country information already in the file, because they are not part of the process that determines or confirms the destination,” it added.
The facts of the case are currently the subject of a battle between opposing claims, given the lack of public awareness of Diawara’s case.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
