Colombia Reacts to Deportation Flights

On Sunday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that no further US deportation flights would be allowed into Colombia.

That same evening, after the Trump administration announced massive sanctions against Colombia and the US embassy stopped processing Colombian visa applications, Fox News announced that Colombia has now decided to send its own planes to the US to pick up Colombian deportees.

The below article in the Colombian Daily, El Espectador, posted Sunday prior to Colombia's latest announcement, is translated by Fousesquawk.

Petro to Trump: Colombia disallows entry of flights with deported migrants

"The United States cannot treat Colombian migrants as delinquents," he told him.

Caption: "The United States cannot treat Colombian migrants as delinquents," Petro told Trump.

On Sunday morning, President Gustavo Petro said that Colombia is not authorizing the passage of flights within the sovereign skies of the nation that come with deported migrants from the United States after the orders in this regard given by Donald Trump.

What Petro told Trump was that in his judgment, Trump should maintain a clear policy for the migrants and therefore, until this results in a dialogue that will eventually become bi-national, Colombia will not authorize the entry of these flights.

And he added, "The United States should establish a protocol of dignified treatment of the migrants before we receive them."

What the Republican magnate has said, now that he is the head of the White House in his second non-consecutive term, is that the US will begin a series of deportations of undocumented people who are illegally in his territory. This, of course, requires several steps, both at the executive level as well as the legislative (level) in Washington. 

In addition, in this same sense, steps are needed at the Colombian level. Nevertheless, since Trump assumed the Oval Office on January 20, he has begun to advance policies that end up colliding with several of those carried out at the regional level, specifically in Colombia, and this has led Petro, who from the beginning, has been very opposed to Trump, occasionally throwing hard barbs against the new US  administration.

Then, in a second posting on X, he justified his decision not to authorize the entry of planes with migrants from the US. He noted that the treatment by the North American government does not protect their dignity and makes them look like "delinquents".

"A migrant is not a criminal and should be treated with the dignity that a human being deserves. For this reason, I have made the US military planes that came with Colombian migrants return. I can't make the migrants stay in a country that does not want them, but if that country sends them back, it should be done with dignity and respect for them and for our country," he wrote.

And he concluded his message by demanding better conditions for the transfer of migrants, as a sign of respect for the country: "In civil planes without being treated as delinquents, we will receive our co-nationals. Colombia respects itself," said Petro.

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*Update January 27- This has been a fast-changing story. The Colombian government has apparently agreed to the deportation flights, seemingly in response to Trump's sanctions move. Petro has reportedly offered to send his own presidential plane to pick up the first load of deportees.