Trump: US will impose sanctions against Colombia over repatriation flights

US President Donald Trump on Sunday said the United States would impose wide-ranging sanctions and tariffs against Colombia over its refusal to accept US military aircraft carrying deported migrants.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said the United States would slap emergency 25 per cent tariffs on all Colombian goods coming into the United States and would raise that to 50 per cent in one week.

In the post, Trump said Colombia’s denial of migrant repatriation flights has jeopardised US national security and the measures are “just the beginning”.
“We will not allow the Colombian Government to violate its legal obligations with regard to the acceptance and return of the Criminals they forced into the United States!” Trump said.

Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro vowed earlier on Sunday to block US deportation flights until migrants were guaranteed “dignified treatment”, escalating the row between Washington and left-wing Latin American governments over Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“The United States cannot treat Colombian migrants as criminals. I forbid entry to our territory to US planes carrying Colombian migrants,” President Gustavo Petro wrote on social media.
In a later post, he said he had “turned back US military planes”, without saying when or how many planes were involved.

He added, however, that he would allow in civilian US flights carrying deported migrants, as long as they were not treated “like criminals”.

The president later said more than 15,600 undocumented Americans were living in Colombia and urged them to “regularise their situation”, while ruling out raids to arrest and deport them.

US officials did not immediately respond to Petro’s remarks, but Trump’s border tsar 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 said on Sunday in a televised interview.
If governments refused, “then we’ll place them [migrants] in a third safe country”, he said, without specifying which countries would qualify as “safe”.

Under Trump’s first presidency, Mexico agreed to take in non-Mexican migrants deported from the United States after being threatened by Trump with punitive trade tariffs.
Under former president Joe Biden, however, the United States reverted to deporting non-Mexican migrants directly to their countries.
Trump’s threats to deport millions of migrants has 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 United States.

Colombia’s warning to Washington came amid outrage in fellow left-wing ally Brazil over the treatment by the Trump administration of dozens of Brazilian migrants deported back to their country on Friday.
The migrants, who were deported under a bilateral agreement predating Trump’s return to the White House, were handcuffed on the flight, in what Brazil called “flagrant disregard” for their basic rights.