CBS News Sunday Morning on April 19, 2026, opened with a hard look at the Trump administration’s push to remake immigration court, while the broadcast also carried an Earth Day segment and a profile of furniture designer George Nakashima. The program aired on CBS at 9:00 a.m. ET and streamed on the CBS News app beginning at 11:00 a.m. ET.
Ted Koppel spoke with former immigration judges about the administration’s removal of more than 200 judges, as well as the replacement of some of them with what are being advertised as deportation judges. Koppel said the issue goes to whether defendants are still getting their day in court, echoing the concern raised by judges who said the current practices strip away due process.
That dispute sits inside President Trump’s broader promise of mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, and it lands at a moment when tens of thousands of people, including U.S. citizens, are being detained by ICE. Immigration judges decide asylum and immigration cases, so the personnel changes go directly to who hears those cases and how quickly they move. In a web extra tied to the broadcast, Professor Daniel Caudillo, who served as an immigration judge in Laredo, Texas, and now directs the Jim and Leah Finley Immigration Law Clinic at Texas Tech University School of Law, discussed immigration judges and due process.
The program also turned to the future in a separate Earth Day triptych, including a segment on sea-based data centers powered by wave energy. The contrast was sharp: one piece focused on how the government is handling people already in the system, while another looked at how technology companies are trying to build the next one. That split gave the broadcast two very different versions of public power, one in court and one at sea.
Later, Sunday Morning returned to the past with George Nakashima, born in 1905 and dead in 1990, who was once considered a giant of 20th century furniture design. A vintage profile from Feb. 19, 1989, featured Faith Daniels at his New Hope, Pa., workshop. The segment also noted that his daughter, Mira Nakashima, took over Nakashima Woodworkers, keeping the company tied to the philosophy George Nakashima described as “that relationship between natural things and the human psyche.”
The morning’s strongest thread was not the variety of topics but the argument beneath them: who controls the institutions that shape daily life, and who gets heard inside them. On this broadcast, the answer was left in plain view.