President Gustavo Petro says Bogota will block US deportation flights until migrants are guaranteed ‘dignified treatment’.
US President Donald Trump has promised to impose tariffs and visa restrictions on Colombia after Bogota turned away two US military aircraft transporting migrants being deported under Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Washington will slap Colombia with 25 percent “emergency tariffs” on all goods coming into the US, which would then be raised to 50 percent in a week, Trump wrote on Truth Social, the social media platform that he owns on Sunday.
He added that his administration will impose a “travel ban and immediate visa revocations” and “visa sanctions” on government officials, as well as their family members and supporters.
The threat comes after Colombian President Gustavo Petro said his government would not accept flights carrying migrants deported from the United States until its administration creates a protocol that treats them with “dignity”.
Petro made the announcement in two X posts, one of which included a news video of migrants reportedly deported to Brazil walking on a tarmac with their hands and feet restrained.
“A migrant is not a criminal and must be treated with the dignity that a human being deserves,” Petro said.
“That is why I returned the US military planes that were carrying Colombian migrants.”
Petro added that his country would receive Colombians in “civilian planes” and “without treatment like criminals”.
Earlier on Sunday, Trump’s border czar told ABC News he was convinced that countries reluctant to take back citizens would cave under US pressure.
“Oh, they’ll take them back,” Tom Homan.
If governments refused, “then we’ll place them [migrants] in a third safe country”, Homan said, without specifying which countries would qualify as “safe”.
Threat of deportations
Trump’s threats to deport millions of migrants without papers have put him on a potential collision course with governments in Latin America, the original home to many of the estimated 11 million undocumented migrants in the US.
Under Trump’s first presidency in 2017-2021, Mexico agreed to take in non-Mexican migrants deported from the US after being threatened by Trump with punitive trade tariffs.
Under US President Joe Biden in 2021-2025, however, Washington reverted to deporting non-Mexican migrants directly to their countries.
On Friday, two Air Force C-17 cargo planes carrying migrants removed from the US touched down in Guatemala.
On the same day, Honduras received two deportation flights carrying a total of 193 people.
As part of a flurry of actions to make good on Trump’s campaign promises to crack down on irregular immigration, his government is also using active-duty military to carry out deportations.
