In this special Blue Amp Media broadcast, we did something corporate media seems no longer willing to do. We exposed horrific human rights violations committed against innocents, which rode shotgun alongside Trump Administration abuses of power.
We did this by showing the banned 60 Minutes investigation into CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious “terrorism confinement center,” and we stopped it—repeatedly—to explain exactly what viewers were seeing, why it matters, and why it represents a profound moral and constitutional crisis for the United States.
The footage itself is harrowing. Venezuelan asylum seekers—many with no criminal records—describe being illegally deported by the United States to a country they had no connection to, detained without due process, and subjected to systematic torture.
This includes beatings, sexual abuse, sleep deprivation, starvation, contaminated water, and prolonged isolation. The reporting documents how these men were used as political props, paraded in front of cameras, and deliberately sent to a prison already condemned by international observers for violating basic human rights.
As we watched the report together, we paused at key moments to underscore what cannot be glossed over. This was not “tough border enforcement.”
This was the deliberate outsourcing of human rights violations—paid for with U.S. taxpayer dollars. We discussed how the administration invoked extraordinary wartime powers to bypass courts, ignored judicial orders, and treated asylum seekers as expendable tools meant to send a message of fear across Latin America.
Just as disturbing as the torture itself was the second story unfolding around it, which is censorship. This 60 Minutes segment was fully reported, legally vetted, and approved—then abruptly pulled.
We talked in real time about what it means when billionaires who fund the dunderheaded liars now inhabiting our government also control the institutions to which they’ve given an integrity vasectomy, power is longer held accountable.
When journalism is a liability and not a public trust, the Fourth Estate collapses into compliance. And when government treats policy like it’s a movie, replete with photo-ops, silly slogans, and fake storylines, democracy’s in trouble.
Throughout the broadcast, we contextualized what viewers were seeing, including how tattoos were falsely used as “evidence” of gang affiliation, how ICE’s own data undermined official narratives, and how international law—including the Geneva Conventions—was violated in plain sight.
I also mocked the inebriated neural networks of the trolls who puttered into our chat to insult us with misspellings of three-letter words, historical illiteracy, and a not-minor-at-all challenge when it came to correctly conjugating verbs. I mean, a guy’s gotta have some fun on a broadcast like this, no?
We also connected this story to the broader pattern of media consolidation in the United States, oligarchic influence, and how both of these have helped pave a path toward the slow but steady normalization of cruelty as policy int he U.S.
This episode was not about partisanship. It was about our democracy, and the creepy, sadistic sods undermining it. About lines being crossed—legally, morally, and historically.
We were blunt because the facts demand nothing less than bluntness. When our government disappears people, pays foreign fascist regimes to place them in concentration camps, and tortures them—and then suppresses the evidence—silence becomes complicity.
We urge viewers not just to watch this footage, but to preserve it, share it, and force it into the public record—because once stories like this vanish, accountability vanishes along with them.
Download the full 60 Minutes CECOT footage
On a happier note—for all those who celebrate, have a Merry Christmas!!
