Colombia, Tariffs, and Deportation Flights, Explained

On Sunday morning, Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that Colombia was suspending permission for previously authorized U.S. deportation flights to land in Colombia. Ostensibly driving Petro’s action were concerns that Colombian nationals were not being treated with respect during the deportation process because they were being transported by military aircraft.

President Donald Trump quickly declared a range of punitive measures in response, including suspension of visa processing at the U.S. Embassy in Colombia, visa sanctions on Colombian government officials and their families, and a 25 percent tariff on Colombian goods, among others. Later Sunday, Colombian Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo said his nation would agree to accept deportation flights, and by Monday afternoon it had sent a military plane of its own to San Diego to transport Colombian nationals awaiting deportation.

While U.S.-Colombia relations have deteriorated significantly in the span of only a few days, the underlying issues behind the rift have been simmering for several years.

How has immigration shaped the U.S.-Colombia relationship in recent years?

The U.S. has historically been a major destination for Colombian immigration. The Colombian diaspora in the U.S. is estimated to be over 1.5 million, making it the seventh largest Latin American diaspora in the country.

The U.S. and Colombia have subsequently developed a good relationship in recent years, which has included a free trade agreement and Colombia’s designation as a major non-NATO ally.

However, two major changes have complicated the U.S.-Colombia relationship in recent years. The first is the increasing number of Colombian nationals who have immigrated to the U.S. via irregular channels. U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded more than 97,000 encounters with Colombian nationals at the southern border in 2024 alone. The majority of these migrants have presented themselves as asylum seekers fleeing political violence from left-wing paramilitaries who are still highly active in parts of Colombia where the government has been unable to negotiate ceasefires.

The second is Colombia’s transformation into a major transit country for migrants from South America and even Africa and Asia, thanks to its location as an entry point for the Darién Gap, a critical route for migrants seeking to reach the U.S. via Central America and Mexico.

This has made Colombian cooperation critical for U.S. attempts to stem illegal migration originating from new sources outside of Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Colombia has collaborated with the U.S. on immigration in significant ways, including by agreeing to act as a host country for the Safe Mobility Initiative, an initiative recently designed to deter irregular migration by offering legal pathways to migrants who could prove they qualified for protection and were willing to wait in partner countries away from the U.S.-Mexico border. 

However, the Trump administration recently deactivated this initiative, and Colombia also shares blame for straining the immigration relationship. Under the left-wing former guerrilla member Petro, Colombia also pressured the U.S. to take less stringent measures on Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro ahead of his fraudulent reelection, under the guise of concerns about Venezuelan migration due to U.S. sanctions.

Additionally, Colombia had previously paused cooperation with U.S. deportation flights under the Biden administration over similar claims of concerns about the treatment of Colombian migrants in U.S. custody. 

Despite this precedent, the political circumstances around the latest refusal are significantly different.

Why did Petro refuse to allow the latest U.S. deportation flight to land?

Over the past five years, Colombia has accepted 475 U.S. deportation flights. While it has paused authorization for U.S. deportation flights before as noted above, this incident was significant both because the flights had already been authorized and because of the extraordinary domestic events in Colombia that preceded it.

In the week before the deportation flight controversy, the process to end decades of fighting between the government, paramilitaries, and criminal groups in Colombia suffered a significant blow as insurgents from the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) drove thousands of Colombian civilians from their homes in the region of Catatumbo and into neighboring Venezuela.

The violence led Petro to declare a state of emergency, and Venezuela took the opportunity to conduct military exercises along its borders in Colombia. Venezuela is widely suspected of supporting the ELN, and Petro continued a long and sordid history of appeasing the Venezuelan regime by authorizing a meeting with Vladimir Padrino López, the Venezuelan regime’s defense minister who is currently wanted in the U.S. for drug trafficking. 

In light of this unrest and Petro’s widespread unpopularity within Colombia, it seems that in addition to objections over the type of aircraft used, picking a fight with Trump over the deportation flight also served to create a distraction from the increasingly apparent failures of Petro’s domestic and foreign policy.

What sanctions did the U.S. and Colombia announce?

The U.S. drafted sanctions on both travel and commerce, some of which it is leaving in place despite Colombia’s stated willingness to resume accepting repatriated citizens. In travel, the U.S. Embassy in Colombia froze visa processing and additionally banned Colombian officials and their families from entering the United States. The visa sanctions on Colombian government figures are set to remain in place until the next U.S. deportation flight successfully lands in Colombia.

Before Colombia agreed to let deportation flights resume, Trump threatened a sweeping 25 percent tariff on Colombian goods until Petro resumes cooperation, with an increase to 50 percent in a week if Colombia continued to refuse deportation flights. Colombian goods entering the country would also be subject to enhanced inspection, and Colombia would be subject to sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). While the heightened inspections remained in place, the sanctions have not been imposed.

For his part, at the end of a lengthy and bizarre X post in which he reminisced about watching a brawl between black and Hispanic residents in Washington, D.C., and claimed Colombians are descended from Romans and Athenians while the U.S. is descended from slave owners, Petro announced that Colombia would impose reciprocal 50 percent tariffs on U.S. products, only to back down hours later.

What could happen next?

In the short term, Petro appears to have folded on this particular matter and U.S. deportation flights to Colombia will resume. The Colombian foreign ministry put out a statement adding that the foreign minister and the ambassador to the U.S. are set to travel to Washington immediately to continue addressing the dispute. 

For now, the compromise appears to be that military aircraft will be used to deport Colombian nationals from the U.S., but Colombia will provide the aircraft and some of the personnel to ensure migrants are repatriated with “dignity.” Colombia sent its first plane to the U.S. on Monday, and stated its intention to send another in the coming days.

Petro is also set to address an extraordinary meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in person in Honduras on Thursday to discuss the diplomatic crisis and migration issues in the region.

If these meetings go poorly or Petro makes further breaks with U.S. immigration policy at his CELAC address, the looming threat of mutual tariffs may come to pass. This would mean prices for some Colombian goods in the U.S. such as coffee and flowers would increase. Colombia’s economy would get the worse end of any economic fallout, especially given the pending Valentine’s Day holiday in the U.S. when flowers usually see some of their largest yearly sales.

In the long term, some speculate that Colombia will try to draw closer to China to lessen the economic role the U.S. plays in the Colombian economy. While Petro would almost certainly like to do this, economic realities and the end of his upcoming term in 2027 will likely limit his ability to effectively do so.

And while Petro may believe that casting the U.S. as a bullying villain may boost his domestic strength, Colombia is unlike some other South American countries in that the longstanding security and immigration relationship between the U.S. and Colombia has yielded enduring positive sentiment towards the U.S. at a popular level. A 2023 Latinobarometro report found that 74.6 percent of Colombians had a favorable or a very favorable view of the United States. Petro’s approval rating before the diplomatic break was less than half that at 34 percent.