CBS News
Princess Kate’s cancer diagnosis highlights balancing act between celebrity and royals’ private lives
The announcement by Catherine, the Princess of Wales, of her cancer diagnosis and treatment has led to a reckoning about how members of the royal family are treated and covered in the media, and about how much privacy they can expect to enjoy as some of the world’s most recognizable individuals.
CBS News royal contributor and royal biographer Tina Brown said seeing Kate, as the princess is commonly known, deliver her news in the video announcement released Friday was “absolutely heart-breaking.”
“I mean, here was this brave, composed, you know, marvelously dignified young woman, talking about something that was deeply shocking and traumatic for her and her family,” said Brown.
But Brown and other royal insiders say while there has been unfair and even gratuitous speculation over Kate’s condition over the last few weeks, there may be lessons for the royal family — and their public relations teams — to take on board as the centuries-old institution continues adapting to our modern world.
Is Princess Kate owed an apology?
Not long after Kate and her husband Prince William’s official Kensington Palace residence announced the Princess of Wales’ surgery and said she would be recovering privately, with no updates expected, the social media rumor mill went into overdrive.
Despite the declaration that there would be no updates, the royal couple posted a U.K. Mother’s Day photo on their official social media pages on March 10 that appeared, at a first glance, to show Kate looking happy and healthy with her children. But Kate was quickly forced to issue an apology of her own, admitting she’d edited the image.
The photo released to quell rumors ended up fueling them, with social media networks abuzz with people suggesting everything from marital problems to a range of unfounded health issues.
“I think that the apologies that are owed are some of these really salacious, horrible things that went on,” Brown said. “There were a lot of mean things. There were lots and lots of jokes.”
Kate, Brown said, had been “ridiculously overwhelmed with all of the trolling and the mad theories and the crazy things that have been said, and she was simply backstage, or struggling with something that was really shocking and upsetting for her and her family.”
“I think we have to really cut them some slack about it at this point. They are people at the end of the day,” Brown said.
Did Kensington Palace get it wrong?
Even for the elite public relations teams on the royal payrolls, this year has brought a series of formidable challenges, and Brown said Kate’s health problems coming in unison with William’s father King Charles III’s own cancer treatment likely added another layer of stress for the family, and may have caused some “chaos.”
Brown said William and Kate were initially dealing with the possibility that “they may be king and queen much quicker than they thought — maybe even in the next couple of years if things go wrong — and she has this shocking diagnosis… Plus three young children who she has to tell and handle, and at the schoolyard, people are obviously saying, ‘What’s wrong with your mommy?’ All these things. I think that there was genuine chaos behind the scenes as they’ve been trying to juggle it all.”
Brown said if she had been advising Kensington Palace on how to handle the public’s insatiable appetite for news about Kate’s recovery, she would have suggested showing the world, literally, how the princess was getting on, and she said the decision to share essentially nothing may have been down to William.
“I would like to have seen that happen a lot earlier, actually, and yes, they did make a complete mess of it, but I’m actually really told that some of it was because William really feels he is going to say, ‘My family do not have to say anything about their private lives.’ So, it’s almost as if he’s telling… the communications apparatus, ‘I don’t want to do this.'”
Brown said “there was argument inside” the palace that it should have provided more in the way of updates. She suggested Kate could merely have appeared earlier on, giving “a wave from the window” or some other signal of her recovery, but that wasn’t done.
In the absence of information, Brown said, “it created a vacuum in which all these terrible rumors poured.”
“The royal family is an incredible, incredibly powerful, tax-funded institution,” Brown said. “Billions of taxpayer dollars support it. Rather than trying to shame people for wondering where she was and all these botched social media moments, why didn’t they use it as a teachable moment about cancer — about empathy — from the jump?”
“But they didn’t do it, and, as I say, we can’t really judge, because what they’re dealing with is so incredible.”
How much privacy should the royals get?
“Members of the royal family understand that they have a public role, but they also feel that there is a private side to their lives. That’s their relationships, that’s their family, and absolutely that’s their health,” said CBS News royal contributor Julian Payne, who previously served as communications director for then-Prince Charles. “They understand that there is interest there, but they will absolutely want to control how they share that information on their own terms, and I don’t think anybody, certainly in the U.K., begrudges them that approach.”
He said that while other kinds of celebrities may understand intense media interest “is integral to the work that they do, for the royal family, I don’t think they view it that same way.”
The royals, whom Payne noted are born or married into their roles, rather than seeking them out, “like to be able to have a line where they do have a private life. They are under such scrutiny all the time that it is really important that they are able to occasionally shut the door and say, ‘Now I’m going back to my own private time.”
Will this change the way the royals share information?
“I think that the members of the family and the institution itself learn all the time,” Payne told CBS News on Monday. “They evolve all the time, and I am absolutely sure that these incredibly difficult last couple of months will give them pause about how they go about sharing information, how long they can maintain that privacy for.”
“I think it’s absolutely right that they seek to protect their private issues around their health, around their relationships, but they do understand that the world is changing and there is more and more interest in people’s private lives,” he said, adding that William, Kate and the rest of their family “are going to have to work hard to continue to protect that space.”
“I think this is what’s so interesting about what we’re seeing now — is it still possible to hold the line between your public role and a private life? And I am absolutely sure that if you ask the family, they would say, ‘Yes, it is.’ They understand the interest, but they also understand that they have a right to privacy, especially around things like their health and wellbeing.”
CBS News
Tajikistan nationals with alleged ISIS ties removed in immigration proceedings, U.S. officials say
When federal agents arrested eight Tajikistan nationals with alleged ties to the Islamic State terror group on immigration charges back in June, U.S. officials reasoned that coordinated raids in Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia would prove the fastest way to disrupt a potential terrorist plot in its earliest stages. Four months later, after being detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, three of the men have already been returned to Tajikistan and Russia, U.S. officials tell CBS News, following removals by immigration court judges.
Four more Tajik nationals – also held in ICE detention facilities – are awaiting removal flights to Central Asia, and U.S. officials anticipate they’ll be returned in the coming few weeks. Only one of the arrested men still awaits his legal proceeding, following a medical issue, though U.S. officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive proceedings indicated that he remains detained and is likely to face a similar outcome.
The men face no additional charges – including terrorism-related offenses – with the decision to immediately arrest and remove them through deportation proceedings, rather than orchestrate a hard-fought terrorism trial in Article III courts, born out of a pressing short-term concern about public safety.
Soon after the eight foreign nationals crossed into the United States, the FBI learned of the potential ties to the Islamic State, CBS News previously reported. The FBI identified early-stage terrorist plotting, triggering their immediate arrests, in part, through a wiretap after the individuals had already been vetted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, law enforcement sources confirmed to CBS News in June.
Several months later, their removals following immigration proceedings mark a departure from the post-9/11 intelligence-sharing architecture of the U.S. government.
Now facing a more diverse migrant population at the U.S.-Mexico border, a new effort is underway by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the Intelligence Community to normalize the direct sharing of classified information – including some marked top-secret – with U.S. immigration judges.
The more routine intelligence sharing with immigration judges is aimed at allowing U.S. immigration courts to more regularly incorporate derogatory information into their decisions. The endeavor has led to the creation of more safes and sensitive compartmented information facilities – also known as SCIFs – to help facilitate the sharing of classified materials. Once considered a last resort for the department, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has sought to use immigration tools, in recent months, to mitigate and disrupt threat activity.
The immigration raids, back in June, underscore the spate of terrorism concerns from the U.S. government this year, as national security agencies point to a system now blinking red in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel, with emerging terrorism hot spots in Central Asia.
A joint intelligence bulletin released this month, and obtained by CBS News, warns that foreign terrorist organizations have exploited the attack nearly one year ago and its aftermath to try to recruit radicalized followers, creating media that compares the October 7 and 9/11 attacks and encouraging “lone attackers to use simple tactics like firearms, knives, Molotov cocktails, and vehicle ramming against Western targets in retaliation for deaths in Gaza.”
In May, ICE arrested an Uzbek man in Baltimore with alleged ISIS ties after he had been living inside the U.S. for more than two years, NBC News first reported.
In the past year, Tajik nationals have engaged in foiled terrorism plots in Russia, Iran and Turkey, as well as Europe, with several Tajik men arrested following March’s deadly attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow that left at least 133 people dead and hundreds more injured.
The attack has been linked to ISIS-K, or the Islamic State Khorasan Province, an off-shoot of ISIS that emerged in 2015, founded by disillusioned members of Pakistani militant groups, including Taliban fighters. In August 2021, during the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, ISIS-K launched a suicide attack in Kabul, killing 13 U.S. service members and at least 170 Afghan civilians.
In a recent change to ICE policy, the agency now recurrently vets foreign nationals arriving from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries, detaining them while they await removal proceedings or immigration hearings.
Only 0.007% of migrant arrivals are flagged by the FBI’s watchlist, and an even smaller number of those asylum seekers are ultimately removed. But with migrants arriving at the Southwest border from conflict zones in the Eastern Hemisphere, posing potential links to extremist or terrorist groups, the White House is now exploring ways to expedite the removal of asylum seekers viewed as a possible threat to the American public.
“Encounters with migrants from Eastern Hemisphere countries—such as China, India, Russia, and western African countries—in FY 2024 have decreased slightly from about 10 to 9 percent of overall encounters, but remain a higher proportion of encounters than before FY 2023,” according to the Homeland Threat Assessment, a public intelligence document released earlier this month.
A senior homeland security official told reporters in a briefing Wednesday, that the U.S. is engaged in an “ongoing effort to try to make sure that we can use every bit of available information that the U.S. government has classified and unclassified, and make sure that the best possible picture about a person seeking to enter the United States is available to frontline personnel who are encountering that person.”
Approximately 139 individuals flagged by the FBI’s terror watchlist have been encountered at the U.S.‑Mexico border through July of fiscal year 2024. That number decreased from 216 during the same timeframe in 2023. CBP encountered 283 watchlisted individuals at the U.S.-Canada border through July of fiscal year 2024, down from 375 encountered during the same timeframe in 2023.
“I think one of the features of the surge in migration over recent years is that our border personnel are encountering a much more diverse and global population of individuals trying to enter the United States or seeking to enter the United States,” a senior DHS official said. “So, at some point in the past, it might have been primarily a Western Hemisphere phenomenon. Now, our border personnel encounter individuals from around the world, from all parts of the world, to include conflict zones and other areas where individuals may have links or can support ties to extremist or terrorist organizations that we have long-standing concerns about.”
In April, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that human smuggling operations at the southern border were trafficking in people with possible connections to terror groups.
“Looking back over my career in law enforcement, I’d be hard-pressed to think of a time when so many different threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at once, but that is the case as I sit here today,” Wray, told Congress in June, just days before most of the Tajik men were arrested.
The expedited return of three Tajiks to Central Asia required tremendous diplomatic communication, facilitated by the State Department, U.S. officials said.
Returns to Central Asia routinely encounter operational and diplomatic hurdles, though regular channels for removal do exist. According to agency data, in 2023, ICE deported only four migrants to Tajikistan.
Robert Legare and
contributed to this report.
Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
