Trump treats migrants as criminals.
Later in the morning, Petro said on X that he had ordered the return of the planes, suggesting that he had done so because they were military aircraft and criticizing the use of handcuffs on the deported Colombians. “We will receive our countrymen on commercial planes, without them being treated like criminals,” he wrote. Just minutes after Trump said he would impose tariffs, Petro’s office said the government would make the presidential plane available to ferry back the Colombians who were to have been deported Sunday.
The U.S. had been deporting migrants to Colombia and other Latin American countries under the Biden administration, usually using commercial flights, the senior State Department official said. So far in January, there have been 90 deportation flights, with 48 to Guatemala and Honduras, 14 to Mexico and eight to Colombia, said Witness at the Border, a U.S. immigration advocacy group that tracks flight data.
Petro on X sought to cast Trump’s tariff threat as an affront to his country’s freedom. “You don’t like our freedom—fine. I do not shake hands with white slaveholders,” Petro said, adding later: “You will never dominate us.”
The dust-up with Colombia reflects the discontent in some Latin American capitals, many of them run by leftist presidents, with the new administration in Washington. Brazil’s foreign ministry issued a statement Sunday protesting what it said was “degrading treatment” of Brazilians deported from the U.S., some of whom it said were handcuffed around their hands and feet on a plane heading for the country Friday.
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