a federal agency opened a deported man's asylum file and posted "fake & gay!" about it. the official account. of the government.
ICE headquarters, Washington, D.C. Photo: G. Edward Johnson, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
via The Daily Beast, IBTimes UK and the posts themselves
Three words and an exclamation point, from an account with a government seal on it: "Fake & Gay!"
That was U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Monday afternoon, about a man it had already removed from the country. The post went on to say that Moussa Diawara, "the Malian national featured in this shockingly poorly researched @60Minutes report, now faces allegations of immigration FRAUD after his asylum application surfaced, revealing that he claimed to be a HOMOSEXUAL man who feared persecution in Mali." By Tuesday morning it had more than 36,000 likes, and IBTimes UK counted about 3 million views.
who moussa diawara is
On Sunday, 60 Minutes ran a segment on deportations to Ghana, and Diawara was its face. Its own promo described a father who had lived in the U.S. for 25 years with no criminal record, deported in July, who "says he was deported without being able to speak to his lawyer or a judge." He drove for Uber in Houston, and his two children are U.S. citizens, according to both the Daily Beast and IBTimes UK. Both report that an immigration judge ordered him removed in 2012 but barred the government from sending him to Mali, and that he was sent to Ghana instead. IBTimes UK reports he says Ghanaian officials then forced him onto a flight to Mali anyway.
how his file got online
The chain took less than a day. Late Sunday, DHS general counsel James Percival posted: "I pulled his file. His claimed reason for fearing Mali was that he is 'gay,' just in case you're wondering how bad the immigration fraud problem is." On Monday, Fox News correspondent Brooke Taylor posted pages of what Fox called his asylum application, writing that "we exclusively obtained" it. About 40 minutes later, ICE quote-posted her with the line above. Fox did not say who gave it the document, and the Daily Beast says it has asked DHS whether it came from inside the department.
We are not reprinting what the application says. It is a confidential document, and the man in it has not spoken publicly about it. Neither Diawara nor his lawyer had addressed the claims as of Tuesday, IBTimes UK reported. Neither ICE nor DHS has shown that he committed fraud; "fake" is their word. And, as the Daily Beast pointed out, a married man with children can still be gay or bisexual, which is a sentence that should not have needed writing in 2026.
what the rule actually says
Federal regulations are blunt here. Under 8 CFR 208.6, information in an asylum application "shall not be disclosed without the written consent of the applicant," with exceptions for things like adjudication, criminal investigations, litigation, "or at the discretion of the Secretary." Nobody has said whether DHS invoked that discretion. Immigration policy expert David Bier called the release "monstrous" and said it "blatantly violates the Privacy Act." Earlier, replying to Percival, he made the obvious point: "Whether true or not, he just endangered him."
That is the part worth sitting with. The whole system of asylum on grounds of sexuality works because the government promises to keep the claim quiet, since the people making it are, by definition, people who say being known as gay could get them hurt. The government just announced one of those claims to millions of strangers, about a man it has already shipped across an ocean, with a joke. We have written before about queer migrants being sent to third countries they have never lived in, and about a gay Phoenix man deported to Equatorial Guinea. This one came with a punchline.
IBTimes UK reports that Diawara's attorney has asked a federal judge in Washington to order his return. We'll follow it.
