The official account for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) used “gay” as an insult when responding to a 60 Minutes report about the deportation of a man from Mali.
“Fake & Gay!” ICE’s official account posted to X while sharing a post from Fox News reporter Brooke Taylor about the 60 Minutes story.
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On X, people responded negatively to ICE’s use of gay as an insult.
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“The US is addicted to hitting a new low everyday it seems… is this account ran by someone in middle school?” one person commented.
“What a disgustingly vile excuse for govt communication,” wrote another.
“You’re a federal entity, not a 16-year-old boy in 1998. Can you at least pretend to act professional?” wrote another person.
At issue is a 60 Minutes report on Moussa Diawara of Mali, who was identified as a “Texas dad” with a wife and two children who are US citizens. Diawara, 57, has been in the US for 24 years and is a refugee with a court order preventing him from being returned to Mali due to the likely persecution he would face there as a Christian in the Muslim-majority country. He has no criminal record and worked as an Uber driver.
Over the summer, he was deported to Ghana because he could not be deported to Mali. The 60 Minutes story highlighted the practice of third-country deportation, which is when the US deports a non-citizen to a country that they are not from, often a country they have no ties to where they may not even know the language. Such deportations were rare prior to 2025, but the second Trump administration has increasingly relied on them to expedite deportations, especially for refugees who have court orders barring them from being returned to their country of origin.
Diawara told 60 Minutes that he was held by armed guards in a hotel in Ghana and then put on a plane and sent to Mali, where he was homeless until he was able to hitch a ride with a truck driver and escape the country again. He said they left him in Mali with no paperwork or money.
Fox News’ response to the 60 Minutes piece involved publishing Diawara’s alleged leaked asylum application, where he claimed to have “female behaviors and feelings” and became “more comfortable being intimate with boys rather than girls” as he grew up. The alleged application says that he hid the fact that he was gay in Mali and wanted to live freely in the US. The alleged application also includes the fact that Diawara converted to Christianity and that his traditional Muslim family threatened to kill him if he returned to Mali.
It’s unclear how Fox obtained the document, although it likely came from the Department of Homeland Security to mitigate the 60 Minutes story. The 60 Minutes story, though, made it clear that Diawara’s immigration status in the US was always uncertain because all he had was a court order preventing his return to Mali and that he had only applied for refugee status in the US.
“Diawara acknowledged that the U.S. had a right to deport him, but not to Mali,” the 60 Minutes report states, adding that the paperwork US officials sent him to Ghana with said that his final destination was Mali. The 60 Minutes story focused mostly on third-country deportations.
Third-country deportations have been used to remove LGBTQ+ people seeking refuge in the US, often sending them to countries where it is illegal to be gay. A gay man from Brazil was recently deported to Equatorial Guinea, for example, and was held by armed guards in a hotel, where they threatened to kill him.
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