Colbert's Cancellation Should Shed Light on the Silencing of Lesser-Known Voices

“If you’re just tuning in to ‘The Late Show,’ you missed a lot,” late-night television host Stephen Colbert told a national television audience as he opened his final monologue on the final episode of his cancelled show on CBS Thursday night.

And if viewers are late to the story of Colbert’s silencing, it’s no stretch to imagine that they’ve heard even less about the muzzling of others who’ve dared to question the methods and motives of a Trump administration that doesn’t like to face facts — or even be the brunt of jokes.

In the shadows of the media glare surrounding CBS’ Trump-sanctioned cancellation of Colbert stand scores of other individuals, organizations and entities of lesser renown who’ve found themselves at the receiving end of Trump-administration efforts to censor their points of view. 

These are all people who are seeking to accurately represent communities that this corrupt and bigoted regime has targeted. In other cases, they’re simply holding up a mirror to an administration that shrinks from accountability.

Mario Guevara

This Spanish-language immigration reporter was livestreaming an Atlanta-area #NoKings protest when ICE agents trundled him into a van and disappeared the journalist into their network of prisons and holding cells, where he was kept without due process for more than 100 days before being deported to El Salvador. The federal government argued that it needed to detain and deport Guevara on the grounds that his constitutionally protected filming of law-enforcement activities created a risk to public safety. The administration’s real intention: Send a chilling message to all journalists and community members who record federal law enforcement, report on government activities and seek to document the truth.

Colleen J. Shogan 

Shogan oversaw the National Archives and Records Administration, which had been a key player in the case about Trump’s mishandling of classified records following his first administration. Shogan learned of her firing in February 2025 from a post on X. Trump handed her archival duties to sycophantic Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Shogan told PBS that the laws that govern the National Archives “were all written under the premise or the guise that the person running the National Archives would be selected because of his or her qualifications, not with regard to partisanship or politics.” Now, according to Shogan, Americans are facing a situation where vital records documenting the nation’s history — blemishes included — will no longer be accessible.

Estefany Rodriguez 

In March 2026, ICE agents operating without a warrant detained Rodríguez, a Colombian investigative journalist and reporter for Nashville Noticias. ICE claimed that she was in the United States illegally even though she was on a path to citizenship — with a pending green-card application through her husband, a U.S. citizen. She had fled Colombia in 2021 after receiving death threats for her reporting on the country’s violent militia groups. Rodriguez was eventually released after rigorous efforts by press-freedom groups including Free Press, but the message was clear. “Rodriguez’s detention is part of a broader erosion of democratic norms and human rights in the United States in which immigration authorities are increasingly being used to chill free expression and First Amendment rights,” stated the dozens of groups that came to her aid.

The Senate Indian Affairs Committee

In the earliest days of the Trump administration, the federal government disappeared a congressionally mandated report on missing and murdered Native Americans from the Justice Department’s website. The report was a byproduct of legislation the Senate Indian Affairs Committee had introduced to provide tribes with solutions to combat an epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous people. The erasure was part of a Trump-ordered purge of official materials that the administration said were grounded in the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, who sponsored the legislation, said it was “astounding” for the administration to seek to bury an effort designed “to address the issue of keeping our communities safe from violent criminals.”

Mahmoud Khalil

The government targeted Khalil, a former Columbia University student and ongoing Palestinian-rights activist, following his advocacy against Israel’s campaign of violence against Palestinians living in Gaza, the West Bank and other parts of the Middle East. ICE agents first detained Khalil in March 2025 as part of a roundup of several current and former college students who participated in the campus protests that swept the country in 2024 (see also Rümeysa Öztürk and Leqaa Kordia).

While his legal-defense team subsequently secured Khalil’s release, the government has since called on an immigration-appeals court to reopen his case for deportation, despite the fact that he’s a permanent U.S. resident who’s married to a U.S. citizen. In May 2026, Khalil said in a statement that the administration “wants to arrest, detain, and deport me to intimidate everyone speaking out for Palestine across this country, and they are willing to violate longstanding U.S. rules and procedures to do it.”

Susman Godfrey

In April 2025, Trump signed an executive order punishing the Susman Godfrey law firm, which helped Dominion Voting Systems obtain a $787.5 million settlement against Fox News and its parent company for lies its on-air talent knowingly told about the result of the 2020 presidential election. The crackdown was part of the White House’s broader concerted effort to punish law firms that have brought civil cases against Trump and his administration — or otherwise upset the thin-skinned president. In Susman Godfrey’s case, the White House was upset over its part in exposing Trump’s thoroughly disproven claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him. Trump’s actions, which blatantly violate the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of expression and the right to counsel, are designed to intimidate any lawyer who seeks to challenge his administration in court.

Badar Khan Suri

In March 2025, masked ICE agents detained Georgetown University researcher Badar Khan Suri, alleging with little evidence that he maintained “close connections to a known or suspected terrorist.” In reality, Suri’s arrest was retaliation for his speech in support of Palestinian rights. He was also targeted because of his family ties to Gaza, where his father-in-law had briefly worked for the government. Following his arrest, ICE took Suri to its Washington offices, where an arresting officer told him that someone at a high level in the Secretary of State’s office “does not want you here,” said the ACLU, which is helping in his legal defense.

“All together, the government’s case against Dr. Suri amounts to a collection of lies and misrepresentations manufactured to allow them to punish him for his protected political speech,” wrote a senior staff attorney at ACLU. “This is dangerous, unprecedented, and unconstitutional.”

Female White House correspondents

Trump often focuses his increasingly unhinged anger on any female reporter who’s simply doing the job of asking him questions about his administration. That list includes Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey (who asked about Jeffrey Epstein), CBS’ Nancy Cordes (who asked about the shooting of two National Guard agents), CNN’s Kaitlan Collins (who asked about the Iran war) and ABC’s Mary Bruce (who asked about the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi). The list goes on, exposing the president’s deep-seated misogyny alongside his hatred of journalists’ efforts to hold him accountable. It’s no surprise coming from a felon who was convicted on 34 criminal counts for his attempts to cover up his cheating on his wife. A New York federal jury also held Trump civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll — one of many women who said he had sexually assaulted them.

Tech-accountability researchers

In 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a “visa restriction policy” against “foreign officials and other persons” who were “complicit in censoring Americans.” The truth is that many of those targeted were not censoring voices but researching the spread of hate speech, harassment, propaganda and disinformation on prominent social-media platforms. As a result, the government has barred several of these researchers from entering the United States, effectively shutting down their ability to continue this important work. “This so-called policy of exclusion has the obvious consequence of chilling efforts to understand and control the spread of disinformation, including efforts to manipulate and disenfranchise voters as the 2026 midterm elections approach,” said Nora Benavidez, Free Press’ senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights.

Benavidez would know. Most of the accounts above were documented in her 2025 report CHOKEHOLD: Donald Trump’s War on Free Speech & the Need for Systemic Resistance, which catalogues and analyzes the Trump administration’s worst assaults on free speech. 

To create the report, she examined original reporting on more than 500 actions — including verbal threats, arrests, lawsuits, regulatory actions and military deployments — by Trump, the Trump White House, Trump-appointed federal regulators, the National Guard, law-enforcement agencies and other branches of government.

“Democracies erode little by little,” Benavidez said at the time. “Would-be dictators need to scare only some of us and the rest will follow. The very reason we must speak out together is so we can leverage our collective power.”

We should care about the muzzling of vulnerable and lesser-known voices as much as we do about the coordinated campaign to remove Colbert from the air, which stemmed from Paramount’s desire to placate Trump and secure merger approvals. When we act in defense of Stephen Colbert’s free-speech rights, let’s not forget those who aren’t receiving similar front-page attention. 

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