Colombia’s President Tests Trump on Migrant Returns, Quickly Backs Down

A diplomatic incident played out on Sunday, as the Colombian government initially refused to accept two planeloads of returnees, followed quickly by visa and tariff threats by President Trump. In response, Colombian President Gustavo Petro offered to send his own personal plane to bring those aliens home in style. Here’s a new acronym: FADFO — “fail to accept deportees, find out” how much things have changed in Washington, D.C.

Gustavo Petro. Left-wing governments have been on the march in the Americas of late, a process that has increased over the past four years of the Biden-Harris administration.

Nowhere is that shift more notable than in Colombia, which up until 2022 had been led by right wing to center-right presidents — a descriptor particularly inapt for Gustavo Petro, who won election to the country’s top position that year.

As Britannica explains:

At age 17, while studying economics at Externado University of Colombia in Bogotá, Petro was recruited by the 19th of April Movement (M-19), a Marxist guerrilla group that took its name from the date on which the group argued that the 1970 Colombian presidential election had been “stolen.”

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In October 1985, while disguised as a woman, Petro was arrested and incarcerated after he was found to be in possession of firearms, homemade explosives, and propaganda. Some three weeks later, while Petro was still behind bars, the M-19 undertook its most notorious operation: an invasion of the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, where it took scores of hostages.

Apparently, that didn’t prevent Petro was winning a seat as a member of the Alianza Democrática M-19 party in the Colombian House of Representatives in 1991, though he did think it wise to take a two-year diplomatic hiatus to Belgium in 1994 before returning and winning reelection to the House in 1998.

His next stop was the Colombian Senate in 2006, though an initial run for the presidency in 2010 was unsuccessful, leaving Petro to console himself by winning election as mayor of the country’s capital, Bogota, in 2012.

His term as mayor was interrupted in 2013 when he was removed from office by the Colombia attorney general following a literal garbage dispute, but his reinstatement in 2014 only burnished his left-wing credentials.

Though he again lost a race for the presidency in 2018, that time he came in second and the consolation prize under Colombian law was a seat in the Senate.

Undeterred, Petro resolved to again run for the presidency in 2022, pushing green-energy initiatives in the oil-rich country and promising to tax the rich to provide funds for antipoverty programs.

Those and other proposals won him 80 percent of the votes of the left-wing Pacto Histórico por Colombia party in the first round of the presidential context in March 2022, and that June he was elected president of Colombia after a run-off.

Things have gone downhill for Petro since then. As NPR explained in March, “during his nearly two years in office, Petro has often floundered and then made matters worse by lashing out at his critics on social media and in incendiary speeches”.

The outlet continued:

Petro has faced fierce opposition from the other branches of power. His push to reform health care, pensions and the labor code have stalled in Congress. Legislators have decried his efforts to make peace with guerrilla groups. Government watchdog agencies annulled the election of Petro’s top congressional ally, suspended his foreign minister for alleged corruption, and are now probing his 2022 election campaign for possible illegal donations.

In June, his disapproval rating hit 62 percent, and by October President Petro complained that a “coup” was underway to replace him after the country’s National Electoral Council started probing into his campaign finances.

Last week, things got worse for the president when at least 80 residents of the cocaine-rich Catatumbo region died in renewed fighting between insurgents from the National Liberation Army (ELN) and remnants of the of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) who have rebranded themselves as the Central General Staff (Estado Mayor Central or “EMC”) in an ongoing narco-war that has left peace talks between Petro’s government and rebels in tatters.

Colombia’s Gambit. Every nation has an obligation to accept its own returned nationals, but many — known as “recalcitrant countries” — often fail to live up to that lofty goal.

Up until this weekend, Colombia was not generally thought of as a recalcitrant country. According to AP, between 2020 and 2024, the South American republic accepted 475 planeloads of its nationals back — 124 in 2024 alone — putting it in fifth place in terms of returnees behind Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and El Salvador.

That said, since FY 2022, more than 400,000 Colombian nationals have been apprehended after entering illegally at the Southwest border, and nearly 50,000 others were stopped at ports of entry nationwide.

In other words, many more removable Colombian nationals have entered the United States in the last five years than have been sent back home, and President Trump — ever the businessman — is attempting to balance out the ledger.

As the New York Times reported, however, the manner in which the Trump administration was sending those migrants back rubbed Bogota the wrong way:

Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, said [early on Sunday] in a series of social media posts that Colombia would not accept military deportation flights from the United States until the Trump administration provided a process to treat Colombian migrants with “dignity and respect.”

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“I cannot make migrants stay in a country that does not want them,” Mr. Petro wrote, “but if that country sends them back, it should be with dignity and respect for them and for our country.” He said he was still open to receiving deportees on nonmilitary flights.

I should note that while comfort is not a top priority on U.S. military aircraft, hundreds to thousands of our troops — and more than a few dignitaries and civilian employees — fly on them daily.

Using such aircraft for deportations is cheaper than buying commercial tickets for the aliens involved in large-scale removal efforts, and more cost-effective than charter flights. Plus, our pilots have to keep their flight hours up, so from a U.S. perspective, it’s a win-win.

President Petro likely wasn’t too concerned about the U.S. perspective when he refused to allow those flights to land, however.

The Times contends that he was reacting to complaints of “degrading treatment” lodged by the Brazilian foreign ministry after 88 of its nationals arrived home on January 24 handcuffed, with some “complain[ing] of mistreatment after not being given water or allowed to use the bathroom during the flight”.

Trump Claps Back. I was in Colombia in June and was surprised to find out that many of the locals had no idea that there was a presidential election coming up in the United States, or that Donald Trump was running for his old job back.

The outcome of the 2024 election is likely top-of-the-fold news there now, however, given that the new U.S. president quickly clapped back to Petro’s gambit on Truth Social:

According to the CIA Factbook entry for the country, exports of goods and services account for nearly 18 percent of Colombia’s GDP, and totaled roughly $68.273 billion in 2023. And more than a quarter, 26 percent, of those exports go to the United States.

Consequently, adding a 25 to 50 percent tariff on Colombian exports to the United States would likely be enough to send the country’s economy into a tailspin.

Visa Sanctions. The threat of visa sanctions is likely more personal to Petro, his government officials, and his fellow members in the Pacto Histórico party.

On January 26, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted:

Note that section 243(d) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) expressly permits Rubio to impose such sanctions whenever “the government of a foreign country denies or unreasonably delays accepting an alien who is a citizen, subject, national, or resident of that country”.

Petro Backtracks. In other words, Trump’s threat was likely far from idle, and unsurprisingly it didn’t take long for President Petro to backtrack from his refusal to accept returnees from the United States.

As Fox News reported on Sunday afternoon:

Colombian President Gustavo Petro offered his presidential plane to repatriate migrants coming back from the U.S. on Sunday in response to stern warnings made by President Donald Trump.

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In a statement translated from Spanish, the Colombian government said the plane will help facilitate a “dignified return.”

“The Government of Colombia, under the direction of President Gustavo Petro, has arranged the presidential plane to facilitate the dignified return of the compatriots who were going to arrive in the country today in the morning, coming from deportation flights,” the translated statement read.

Colombia is the 19th largest exporter of crude oil in the world, which is good because the presidential jet will need a lot of fuel if Petro plans to keep ferrying deportees from the United States in it. Respectfully, U.S. Air Force C-17s are a much more economical ride.

Shortly before Petro’s announcement was made, Trump posted the following on Truth Social:

The sign behind the president in the AI-generated image should probably read “FADFO”, because if countries follow Colombia’s lead “fail to accept deportees”, they’re going to “find out” just how much things have changed in Washington, D.C. now that Trump’s back.