UC Berkeley team is highlighted in “60 Minutes” story pulled from broadcast

The story pulled from “60 Minutes” just hours before airtime on December 21 by new CBS Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss includes interviews with a team of UC Berkeley students who provided essential research for an investigation about the conditions in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or CECOT megaprison.

Students in the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center’s Investigations Lab used open source techniques to independently verify and corroborate information gathered by Human Rights Watch and Cristosal that led to the report — You Have Arrived in Hell — about the treatment of Venezuelan migrants who were rounded up and sent to CECOT by the Trump Administration.

Photo courtesy of the Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley.

That report, published in mid-November, had already made headlines as it detailed the torture and brutal treatment of migrants sent without due process to the Salvadoran prison by the Trump Administration. The “60 Minutes” story, as originally produced, references the research and report, alongside new interviews and additional information about the abuse of Venezuelan migrants.

“The ‘60 Minutes’ piece being held ended up being an additional catalyst for understanding that we really are in a moment, historically, when press is very much under attack, where independent media are under threat and the importance of the human right of access to information is being challenged,” said Alexa Koenig, co-faculty director of the Human Rights Center and director of the Investigations Lab. Koenig teaches at Berkeley Law and has taught about open source investigative methods at Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program.

The Investigations Lab, which is based at the Human Rights Center at Berkeley Law and includes graduate and undergraduate students, provided digital open source research support for the Human Rights Watch Americas team. The Lab, launched in 2016, is the first university-based open source research team of its kind in the world and has collaborated with researchers, journalists and lawyers on dozens of projects.  Berkeley Journalism students often join the Lab, which often collaborates with the school’s Investigative Reporting Program.

First-year journalism master’s student Kyle Sweasey, MJ ’27, was selected to be part of the 30-person lab. He said he spent hours watching, analyzing and verifying videos uploaded by influencers or featuring prison guards that celebrated the state-of-the-art prison, which opened in 2023.

“Part of the fun of it was looking at these guys who had no idea that they were giving me Easter eggs,” said Sweasey, about the detailed information he could glean in the background of a prison interview, for example. “The best part about it was using their own propaganda to hold them accountable.”

Koenig said it’s important to note that the student researchers did not have access to the personal testimonies from Venezuelan migrants collected by Human Rights Watch; the students corroborated details independently. They did so by analyzing publicly uploaded videos from CECOT that revealed details about architecture, access to water, sources of light and more. They watched videos taken by influencers who had been invited into the prison and publicly uploaded, often going frame by frame to analyze and corroborate details. They used satellite imagery taken over time until the prison’s completion in 2023 to map CECOT’s modules and structures.

In a leaked email to CBS senior staff published by Axios, Weiss called the analysis from the Berkeley students “strange” and wondered what it added.

Koenig said it’s easy to answer that question. The student work, she said, is part of rigorous fact-finding and verification that may — or may not — corroborate personal testimony. It was done using open source verification techniques.

“What we’re hoping the open source investigation contributed is that it keeps these narratives from being a ‘he said, he said’ where the Trump administration is claiming these men are violent felons and ‘the worst of the worst’ as opposed to human beings who in many cases do not have a criminal record, at least according to the reporting we’ve seen from Human Rights Watch, Cristosol and others,” Koenig said. “The gold standard for any investigation is to triangulate and bring together any physical evidence you can get your hands on with any documentary evidence… with the testimonies of people who have been directly impacted or with experts who have something to contribute.”

The “60 Minutes” story, which Weiss said would air at a future date after additional reporting and comment from Trump administration officials, aired on Canadian Global television. Some viewers took video footage of the episode and uploaded it to YouTube.

Even before the Human Rights Watch report was released, the New York Times published “‘You Are All Terrorists’: Four Months in a Salvadoran Prison,” which included testimonies from some 40 Venezuelans about the abuses they endured in CECOT. Frontline’s short documentary “Surviving Cecot,” produced by ProPublica with Alianza Rebelde Investiga, Cazadores de Fake News and The Texas Tribune, aired on December 9.

Stories about the pulled “60 Minutes” piece — appearing in publications such as Democracy Now and The Nation, as well as on KQED and ABC7 in the Bay Area — have also been widespread. Still, there’s hope that the program will air on “60 Minutes,” which has an estimated viewership that averages more than 10 million people, and in 2025 claimed 7 of the top 100 primetime shows rated by Nielson — nearly half of which are sports-related.

“Forensic investigations, like the one undertaken by Berkeley’s Human Rights Center for Human Rights Watch, help tell complete stories that governments and institutions may seek to suppress,” said UC Berkeley Journalism Dean Michael D. Bolden. “Equipping the public with factual, contextual information helps us all hold the powerful to account and advocate for the change we need to improve our communities and move humanity forward.”

Koenig agrees, noting that every journalist and every lawyer should have some fundamental skills to source information from online spaces and be able to assess its trustworthiness.

“This is incredibly important right now, especially when facts are very much under attack,” Koenig said. “And the truth is being challenged right and left.”

—  Andrea Lampros