01/18/2026: Minneapolis, Inside CECOT, Salties

0:07One week after an ICE agent shot Renee Good, this was the scene in Minneapolis. It is exactly what police chief Brian O 'Hara feared. I'm afraid we're going to have another moment where it all explodes. Are you bothered by seeing American citizens getting detained in these operations? I'm bothered by seeing people take action against my officers. Get out! It began as soon as the planes landed. The deportees thought they were headed from the U.S. back to Venezuela, but instead they were shackled, paraded in front of cameras, and delivered to CICOT, the notorious maximum security prison in El Salvador, where they told 60 Minutes they endured four months of hell.

1:01Did you think you were going to die there? We thought we were already the living dead, honestly.

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2:30By now, you have no doubt seen many of the scenes from Minneapolis. Immigration agents demanding proof of citizenship, even from some American citizens, protesters swarming as agents make arrests, the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE officer. This past week, we went to Minneapolis and spoke with two men at the center of the crisis, the chief of police and the head of ICE's deportation operation, both veteran law enforcement officers with two very different views of what is unfolding. Tonight, there are 3 ,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents in the Minneapolis area. That's nearly five times the number of police on the city's force, making it the largest ever deployment of federal immigration officers to an American city.

3:20One week after an ICE officer shot Renee Good, this was the scene on the streets of Minneapolis. Federal immigration agents facing off against angry protesters. It is exactly what Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O 'Hara feared. He's been tasked with rebuilding trust between the community and police in the wake of George Floyd's murder nearly six years ago. We're in this 2020 moment where all these tensions have been building. And I'm afraid we're going to have another moment where it all explodes. Late Wednesday night, we witnessed the anger ourselves. It's not a good place to be! Get the f*** out of here!

4:06Leave! Leave! Go home! Leave! We are just hours after meeting with the police chief here in Minneapolis, where he told us that tensions were so high he was worried that violence would take place, something else would happen in this community. You can hear flashbangs behind me. We are now just a few blocks away from where federal immigration agents have been involved in another shooting here in Minneapolis. ICE says one of its officers shot a Venezuelan man in the leg after he and two other migrants attacked the officer with a snow shovel and broom handle. ICE says the three men are in the country illegally.

4:44The Trump administration says the goal is to crack down on illegal immigration and weed out fraud. They call it Operation Metro Surge. Elected officials in Minneapolis call it an occupation. Administration officials are adamant that this action that they are undertaking in Minneapolis right now is making this city safer. Targeted, precise, preplanned operations on violent offenders. That is a good thing. But I'm concerned that people in the administration don't actually understand the reality of what's happening on the street. Chief O 'Hara told us the city's 911 system is overwhelmed by complaints about immigration enforcement.

5:36What are you seeing? I've seen multiple calls of people who have been subjected to tear gas, pepper spray. We need more water. At least one case, a person was removed from a vehicle and the car wasn't even placed in park and it was rolling down the roadway. In an ideal world... It is a city on edge. And as we walked with the chief, we heard it from a man in a passing car. How dare you let this happen here? You should be f***ing ashamed. You should be f***ing sick. F***ing pig! What do you want someone like that who just yelled at you and said you let this happen to know? Well, I have been very publicly saying this has been a risk for several weeks.

6:21Trying to get anyone in the position of authority to understand that tragedy was imminent. The fatal shooting of Renee Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross has become a kind of Rorschach test. Some see a senseless killing. Others see an officer defending his life. I've seen the videos, and it's not clear to me why he appears to be in the path of the vehicle more than once. When you approach someone in a vehicle, in a law enforcement encounter, there's very basic steps you take to ensure the officer's safety and to de-escalate the situation. But the day after the shooting, Vice President J.D. Vance put the blame squarely on Renee Good.

7:12It's a tragedy of her own making. Homeland Security officials have accused Good and her wife of, quote, stalking immigration agents and impeding their work. I said go get yourself some lunch, big boy. Top federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned in part, sources told CBS News, because they were told to investigate the actions of Renee Good and her wife. rather than Officer Ross. Shame! State investigators were blocked from the investigation altogether. Can Americans trust what's coming out about the status of this investigation right now? The rhetoric that's coming out from a lot of our politicians is to not trust us, which is very odd to me when a lot of Americans would rather believe what they see on TikTok compared to a government agency.

8:07We spoke to ICE's Marcos Charles, who oversees arrests and deportations nationwide, including Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. Could you see why some Americans might think that what's happening on the streets of some of these cities leads them to see ICE's feeling emboldened right now? I would tell those people or ask those people to become educated on what we do and how we do it and what our authorizations are and the laws in general. Videos of confrontations between protesters and immigration agents seem to go viral nearly every day. They have a right to observe, record, and object to police activity.

8:52Do they have a right to get in an agent's face and call them a Nazi? People have a right to say disrespectful things. As a professional, I have an obligation not to take that personally and not to retaliate. However, they cannot physically obstruct law enforcement from performing a function. Those things are illegal. This past week, the Department of Homeland Security posted a message from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller telling ICE agents, you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Does that mean that immigration agents can go into American cities and carry out immigration enforcement with no accountability, no consequences?

9:39I'm not going to comment on Mr. Miller's statement as far as in the context that you're asking. However, I will tell you that everywhere we go in the United States, our officers are out there conducting enforcement actions, and they're doing it lawfully and with professionalism. But scenes like this in Minneapolis, where one officer drags a woman and another points his gun at bystanders, have raised questions about their conduct. No one has been disciplined in any of these actions? No, no. I think a lot of people would be surprised to hear you say that. If you assault one of our officers, an assault would be putting hands on one of my officers, spitting in their face, pushing them, you're going to get arrested.

10:22I don't think most Americans would disagree with you on that. What concerns a lot of people is some of the images that they've seen. There's a perception out there that immigration agents in Minneapolis and many other cities are acting with impunity. You're not seeing the entirety of the situation. Not only that, mainstream media is picking up those social media posts and putting them out as real news without looking at the whole story. We did look into this story. Six days after and two blocks away from where Renee Good was killed, Alia Rahman, a U.S. citizen, was trying to get to an appointment at a traumatic brain injury clinic when she came upon ICE officers who were blocking traffic after arresting four people.

11:15We reviewed footage of the entire incident. Rachman's lawyer told us she was overwhelmed by conflicting commands from ICE.

11:31In the chaos, you can hear her say she is disabled.

11:45Chief O 'Hara hadn't seen the video before we showed it to him. Oh, my God.

11:59Um, you were shaking watching that.

12:05Obviously, I don't know why law enforcement officers initially approached the vehicle. It pisses me off to see that, to see men doing that to a woman who's disabled. It pisses me off. If those cops works for me, they'd have a problem right now. Marcos Charles of Ice had a different take. He said Aliyah Rahman was given repeated warnings. She was arrested but never charged. Our officers are told that they give one warning to follow the lawful instruction to stop impeding. If she did not obey that lawful order, then she was going to get arrested. You know, I showed this same clip to the Minneapolis police chief, and he said if those cops worked for him, they'd have a problem.

12:53We're not Minneapolis PD. Are you bothered by seeing American citizens getting detained in these operations? I'm bothered by seeing people take action against my officers, using vehicles to try to ram them, assaulting my officers. Our officers are humans, you know, they're people. The Department of Homeland Security released these images of injured ICE officers. According to the agency, attacks on ICE officers nationwide jumped from 19 in 2024 to 275 last year. In many cases, those injuries were sustained as agents were carrying out what ICE calls targeted enforcement. In Minneapolis, many residents say it seems to be less targeted every day.

13:48American citizens are getting stopped and questioned, including a woman walking down the street. Ma 'am, where were you born? It doesn't matter where I was born. I belong here. I am your citizen. And this Uber driver. I can hear you don't have the same accent as me. That's why I'm asking you. Oh, so you're going by accents now? People have been stopped for simply appearing to be Somali or appearing to be Latino or appearing to be foreign. And it's concerning because we also know we're not getting these stories from Irish folks and Norwegian folks here. Our officers are conducting targeted enforcement, looking for the worst of the worst.

14:27If they encounter anybody in the area of which they're operating, they are okay to talk to those people. They've been authorized to talk to anybody that's around there and establish citizenship. How is that targeted enforcement? If they were in that area looking for a target and they were en route or coming from that target and encountered that individual, they are authorized to talk to somebody. How do you define the area? Officers are walking down the street, driving down the street, the entire city of Minneapolis. Is everybody potentially under suspicion? No. Nobody's under suspicion, but we're looking for those targets.

15:07And again, if we walk, encounter somebody as we're walking up to a building, as we're en route to that building, that's still part of that operation as they proceed to that target. On Friday, sources told CBS News the Justice Department is investigating the city's mayor, Jacob Fry, and the state's governor, Tim Walz, both Democrats. The allegation that their public statements about ICE enforcement amount to criminal interference. To ice? Get the f*** out of Minneapolis. Fry and Walls called the investigation political intimidation. What could happen today, tomorrow, to bring this temperature down out there?

15:49I think it requires the president to say, we're still going to go after the worst of the worst. But we're not going to be treating American citizens in ways that risk destroying a beautiful American city.

16:11I'm Emma Greed, host of Aspire with Emma Greed, a podcast where I sit down with people who don't just dream big, they build big. From culture-shaping voices like Mel Robbins to leaders redefining success like Tracey Ellis Ross to game-changing entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban, Aspire is about mindset, ambition, and doing the work that actually moves the needle. If you're ready to raise your standards and take charge about the life and career you're building, Aspire is where you start. Follow and listen to Aspire with me, Emma Greed, and Odyssey Podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts. Nicolas Maduro, the former president of Venezuela, now sits in a federal jail in New York awaiting trial.

16:50After a high-stakes raid, the White House touted Maduro's capture as a blow to narco-terrorists, who it says flooded U.S. streets with drugs. The repression of the Maduro regime, over more than a decade, forced 8 million Venezuelans to flee—nearly a million of them—to the United States. Last year, in the biggest U.S. immigration crackdown in recent history, hundreds of those Venezuelans were deported to El Salvador, a country most had no connection to. The White House claimed they were part of a violent gang, and designated them as terrorists. The administration invoked a centuries-old wartime power, the Alien Enemies Act, to rapidly deport some of the men.

17:34Between March and April of last year, the U.S. sent 252 Venezuelan men to a brutal maximum security prison in El Salvador known as SICOT. You will hear from two of those men. They described torture, sexual and physical abuse inside the prison. Since November, 60 Minutes has made several attempts to interview key Trump administration officials on camera about our story. They declined our request. Tonight, our report from Inside Seacott. It began as soon as the planes landed. The deportees thought they were headed back to Venezuela, but then saw hundreds of Salvadoran police waiting for them on the tarmac.

18:24Shackled, they were paraded in front of cameras, pushed onto buses, and delivered to CICOT, El Salvador's notorious maximum security prison. When we got there, the CICOT director was talking to us. First thing he told us was that we would never see the light of day or night again. He said, welcome to hell. I'll make sure you never leave. Did you think you were going to die there? We thought we were already the living dead, honestly. We met Luis Munoz Pinto in Colombia. He was a college student in repressive Venezuela and hoped to seek asylum in the United States. In 2024, he says he waited in Mexico until his scheduled appointment with U.S.

19:14Customs and Border Protection in California. During that interview... They just looked at me and told me I was a danger to society. You have no criminal record? I don't even... I never even got a traffic ticket. Nevertheless, he was detained by customs. He says he spent six months locked up in the U.S., waiting for a decision on his asylum case when he was deported. One of 252 Venezuelans sent to Seacot between March and April. Inside, he says, their hands and feet were tied. Forced to their knees, their heads were shaved. There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn't take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves.

20:02When you get there, you already know you're in hell. You don't need anyone else to tell you. He says the guards began savagely beating them with their fists and batons. Tell me about what they did to you personally. Four guards grabbed me, and they beat me until I bled, to the point of agony. They knocked our faces against the wall. That was when they broke one of my teeth. CICOT, the terrorism confinement center, was built in 2022.

20:35As a key part of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's sweeping anti-gang crackdown. The massive prison, designed to hold 40 ,000 inmates and its harsh reputation, are a point of pride for Bukele, who regularly allows social media influencers to tour it.

20:58Guards show off cramped cells where metal bunks are stacked four high. There are no mattresses or sheets. Inmates said they had no access to the outdoors and no contact with relatives. International observers warned SECOT was violating the U.N. standard for minimum treatment of prisoners. And two years ago, during the Biden administration, the U.S. State Department cited torture and life-threatening prison conditions in its report on El Salvador. But this year, during a meeting with President Bukele at the White House, President Trump expressed admiration for El Salvador's prison system. They're great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don't play games.

21:45In March, the U.S. struck a deal to pay El Salvador$4.7 million to house Venezuelan deportees at CICOT. These are heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators, who have no right to be in this country, and they must be held accountable. The U.S. government said these people are the worst of the worst. These people are migrants. And the sad reality is that the U.S. government tried to make an example out of them. They sent them to a place where they were likely to be tortured to send migrants across Latin America the message that they should not come to the United States.

22:26Juan Papier is a deputy director at the non-profit Human Rights Watch. In an 81-page report released in November, the organization concluded there was systematic torture and other abuses at Seacott, and that nearly half of the Venezuelans the U.S. sent there had no criminal history. Only eight of the men had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense. How do you know they weren't gang members? We cross-referenced federal databases, databases in all 50 states in the United States, and also obtained criminal records in Venezuela and in the countries where these people lived. And the information we obtained in the United States is based on data provided by ICE.

23:13So ICE's own records said... ICE's own records say that only 3 % of them had been sentenced for a violent or potentially violent crime. 60 Minutes reviewed the available ICE data. It confirms the findings of Human Rights Watch. It shows 70 men had pending criminal charges in the U.S., which could include immigration violations. We don't know because the Department of Homeland Security has never released a complete list of the names or criminal histories of the men it sent to Seacott. Rapid deportations have been a key part of the Trump administration's immigration overhaul. The administration considers anyone who crosses the border illegally to be a criminal.

23:56Illegal crossings are now at a historic low. But some immigration attorneys say the administration has used flawed criteria to justify deportations. I have some tattoos. None of them have anything to do with any criminal group. I explained to them, saying that I didn't belong to any gang, to which the agent responded, but you are Venezuelan. 60 Minutes reviewed this document agents use to assess Venezuelans. A person with eight points was designated as a Trendy Aragua gang member and a portable. Tattoos, an immigration officer suspected of being gang-related, earned four points. But criminologists who study gangs say tattoos are not a reliable way to identify Venezuelan gang members because, unlike some Central American gangs, such as MS-13, Trendy Aragua does not use tattoos to signal membership.

24:59Venezuelan national William Lozada Sanchez was also deported to Seacott. He told us the guards there also accused Venezuelans with tattoos of being gang members. He detailed months of abuse and being forced into stress positions. So you had to be on your knees for 24 hours? Yes, because they put a guard there to watch us so that we wouldn't move. And what would happen if you could make it? They'd take us to the island. What's the island? The island is a little room where there's no light, no ventilation, nothing. It's a cell for punishment where you can't see your hand in front of your face. After they locked us in, they came to beat us every half hour.

25:44and they pounded on the door with their sticks to traumatize us while we were in there. The torture was never ending. They would take you there and beat you for hours and leave you locked in there for days. Some of the deportees described being sexually assaulted by the guards. They were hitting your private parts? Sí. With a baton? No. No, they tugged at them with their hands. And they did that to multiple people? To most of us. The men say they grew weaker by the day. They claim the prison lights were left on 24 hours a day, making it difficult to sleep, and that food and medicine were often withheld.