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ICE Goons Give ‘Sick’ Response to ‘60 Minutes’ Report

Trump’s immigration agency mocked a deported father’s sexuality in an extraordinary attack.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s immigration enforcers have sparked outrage with a juvenile “Fake & Gay!” attack on a deported father that critics say broke federal privacy laws and could have endangered his life.

The grotesque outburst came after CBS’s 60 Minutes revealed how Moussa Diawara, 57, a married father of two teenage children, had been expelled from the United States in July.

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He was sent to Ghana, a country with which he had no ties, after a U.S. immigration judge ruled in 2012 that he could not be deported to his native Mali because he faced persecution there.

The package, which was broadcast Sunday, featured Diawara, an Uber driver from Houston, Texas, who had lived in the United States for 25 years and had no criminal record, speaking by video to his distraught wife, Barbara, and their two children, Corey, 16, and Chloe, 12, who are American citizens.

Rather than simply disputing the network’s findings, the official ICE X account posted Monday: “Fake & Gay!”

The agency claimed Diawara’s asylum application showed he had told authorities he was homosexual and feared persecution in his homeland, and accused him of immigration fraud.

It posted its slur following an equally extraordinary admission by Department of Homeland Security general counsel James Percival, who appeared in the 60 Minutes investigation. “I pulled his file,” Percival boasted on X, claiming Diawara had cited being gay as his reason for fearing deportation to Mali.

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Percival used the claim to highlight widespread abuse of the immigration system, although neither he nor ICE has publicly established that Diawara had committed fraud. A married man with children may be gay or bisexual.

Both posts came in response to a Fox News reporter who had obtained Diawara’s paperwork and shared it online.

In it, Diawara wrote: “Although I was born as a boy, but things appeared differently for me as I was already having female behaviors and feelings. I was more comfortable being intimate with boys rather than with girls.”

Describing his life after arriving in the United States, he said: “Since I came to the USA I had the possibilities to express my feelings to men without any embarrassment no reserve.”

Fox News did not disclose who released the asylum application to them. The Daily Beast has asked the network and DHS whether it came from inside the department.

But the administration’s decision to broadcast details from a confidential immigration file prompted furious accusations of unlawful conduct. Horrified immigration policy expert David J. Bier accused officials of violating the Privacy Act, which generally restricts federal agencies from publicly releasing personal information held in government records.

Bier added that officials could reject asylum applications without revealing their contents to the world, calling the disclosure “monstrous” and “utterly inexcusable.” He warned that “if his life wasn’t in danger before, it is now.”

In a separate post, Bier said Percival had potentially endangered Diawara regardless of whether the claim about his sexuality was accurate. “Why? Sick,” he concluded.

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Federal regulations governing asylum confidentiality generally prohibit revealing information contained in asylum applications without the applicant’s consent. Certain exceptions, including disclosures authorized by the DHS secretary, do exist.

It has not been stated whether DHS authorized disclosure of Diawara’s records or obtained his permission.

The Daily Beast has contacted DHS for comment.

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Tom LatchemLead Global Correspondent

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