Trump deported 200 Colombians. None were criminals, Colombian officials say.
Among the deportees who arrived back home Tuesday in Colombia were two pregnant women and more than 20 children.
January 28, 2025 at 6:25 p.m. ESTYesterday at 6:25 p.m. EST
5 min
Migrants deported from the United States are received by a Red Cross member at El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá, Colombia, on Tuesday. (Alejandro Martinez/AFP/Getty Images)
By
Samantha Schmidt
and
Maria Sacchetti
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — President
Donald Trump threatened to punish Colombia with tariffs, a travel ban and other sanctions to compel it to accept deportation flights carrying
“Illegal Criminals.” But Colombian officials said there were no criminals among the two planeloads of migrants the U.S. government sent over Tuesday.
Among the more than 200 deportees were two pregnant women and more than 20 children, Colombian officials said after the flights landed.
“They are not criminals,” Luis Gilberto Murillo, Colombia’s foreign minister, said in a video statement posted on X. “Being a migrant is not a crime.”
The
social media standoff between Colombian President Gustavo Petro and Trump erupted over the weekend as the new U.S. administration attempted to launch the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. In the end, Trump dropped his trade threats after Colombia agreed to the flights.
After taking office, Trump said he would remove violent criminals quickly, and he has enlisted the military, the FBI and other agencies to aid his deportation effort.
“These are murderers. These are people that have been as bad as you get. As bad as anybody you’ve seen,” he told
reporters Friday. “We’re taking them out first.”
Immigration officials have made thousands of arrests since Trump took office, including of immigrants convicted of sex offenses and other serious crimes. But officials have not said how many violent offenders have been removed from the country.
The Department of Homeland Security and its immigration and border agencies did not respond to questions about the criminal backgrounds of the deportees to Colombia.
Deportees at the Bogotá airport. Two Colombian military planes carrying about 200 migrants deported from the United States landed there Tuesday. (Alejandro Martinez/AFP/Getty Images)
The department said Monday that it had removed 7,300 immigrants who were in the United States illegally in the past week.
Without offering any evidence,
officials declared that they had “fulfilled President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport violent criminals illegally in the country.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a briefing Tuesday that the administration considers “all” immigrants who are in the United States illegally to be criminals.
“They illegally broke our nation’s laws and, therefore, they are criminals as far as this administration goes,” she said, calling the declaration a “big culture shift in our nation.” Deportation is a civil, not criminal, proceeding.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported last year that people with criminal histories accounted for only 8 percent of the immigrants it was tracking for possible removal.
In the United States,
people are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
In interviews with local media in Bogotá, some who were sent back said they had recently crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally and were quickly picked up and sent home.
Though recent border crossers have long been a priority for removal, including under the Biden administration, federal records
show most border crossers do not have criminal records.
Trump officials have publicized immigration raids targeting criminals in “sanctuary cities” such as
New York and Chicago that are home to large numbers of immigrants far from the southern border.
Local governments have been leery of cooperating with ICE because the agency may also arrest otherwise law-abiding undocumented immigrants who came to the United States to work.
The White House has been posting orange-framed mug shots of people arrested in cities such as Houston, Baltimore and Seattle, sometimes without names, making it difficult to independently verify their criminal records.
Deportees leave the Bogotá airport on Tuesday. (Carlos Ortega/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Before Trump took office, ICE officials said they had more than 660,000 people with criminal histories on their docket of 7.8 million immigrants facing possible deportation nationwide.
Many with criminal records cannot swiftly be deported because they are serving time in prison.
Fifty-nine percent of those with homicide convictions, for instance, were incarcerated in federal, state or local prisons as of September, according to DHS data obtained by The Washington Post.
Ninety percent of those with homicide convictions were added to ICE’s docket before 2021, meaning that Trump wasn’t able to deport them during his first term, the records show.
Although Colombia has accepted deportation flights from the United States for years, Petro denied entry to two U.S. military planes early Sunday and said any deportations should be carried out with “dignity and respect.”
On Sunday, Trump said Colombia had agreed to accept U.S. military deportation flights, but Petro ultimately dispatched the Colombian air force to pick up deportees on the southern U.S. border Tuesday and take them to Bogotá.
A flight from El Paso had 91 Colombians on board, while another from San Diego carried 110 deportees, according to the Colombian Foreign Ministry.
One of the men deported told a Colombian radio station that U.S. border agents shackled his wrists and legs after taking him into custody. He said he had crossed the border into the United States a week ago.
The children all arrived accompanied by adults, according to Colombia’s child welfare agency. Their ages ranged from 1 to 17.
Trump posted on social media Sunday that the flights, including military ones, would continue.
“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!” he wrote on
Truth Social.
Petro and other Colombian officials celebrated the return of their citizens Tuesday and offered them resettlement assistance. Officials said the migrants were given medical care and food.
“They are Colombians, they are free and dignified and they are in their homeland where they are loved,” Petro wrote on X. “Migrants are not criminals, they are human beings who want to work and progress, to live life.”
Isaac Arnsdorf contributed to this report.
