The president of Colombia, Abelardo de la Espriella, has ordered this Sunday to start police operations to pursue and deport irregular immigrants, in a complete turnaround of the policy that the largest recipient of the Venezuelan diaspora has maintained for more than a decade. “Let the coordinated operations begin to find illegal immigrants, first those who are committing crimes, second those who do not have their situation regularized, who within the term of the distance will have to be deported,” he said during a security council in Barranquilla, the Caribbean city that has practically become the country’s alternate capital.
The far-right head of state, who has been in office for less than three weeks, has assured that his order must begin to be fulfilled this very week. “I will not accept illegal immigrants, wherever they come from, who are committing misdeeds in Colombia. They leave and we deport them. It is a political and administrative decision and I assume it,” continued the criminal lawyer. The announcement was preceded by nationalist allusions: “First the Colombians, second the Colombians and third the Colombians.” Although he did not say it explicitly, his announcement especially affects the 2.8 million Venezuelans living in Colombia, who represent about 90% of the total immigrants in the country. Of them, 848,000 are in an irregular situation in Colombia, according to official data from Migración Colombia, and of those 193,000 are children and adolescents.
Ronal Rodríguez, spokesperson and researcher at the Venezuela Observatory of the University of Rosario, explains that the announcement means a paradigm shift in the way the last three Colombian governments have received and attended to the migrant population from the neighboring country. “It is dangerous that the president joins a discourse that stigmatizes migrants by asserting that they are illegal. That discourse has existed in the region, unfortunately it has gained ground worldwide, but Colombia had distanced itself,” the expert explains by phone.
Since the Venezuelan migratory crisis began in 2015, when more than 7.8 million people left that country, Colombia created legal and social instruments for the regularization of that population. With centrist, right-wing, and left-wing governments, it became a world example of good migratory regulation practices, and received and assimilated almost a third of that diaspora. The expert insists that in Colombia there are no illegal immigrants, but rather those in an irregular situation. “The government puts all migrants in the same bag and talks about criminality clearly associated with irregularity. That is not the case in Colombia: a person who is in an irregular status is not a criminal,” Rodríguez explains.
De la Espriella’s decision to pursue and deport almost one million foreigners with irregular migratory status has generated criticism from the political opposition. Congresswoman María Fernanda Carrascal, from the leftist Historic Pact, the party of former president Gustavo Petro, assures that the announcement is not only disastrous but cruel. “Linking irregular migrants with criminality solely because of having an irregular migratory status is an affront to human rights, and an absurd and evidence-lacking statement,” she says in conversation with this newspaper. “They seek to construct migrants as scapegoats, as subjects on whom a target is placed, with the intention that society expresses its discontent against them.” The representative to the Chamber for Bogotá points out that the announcement is dangerous: “More than opening the door to xenophobia, it consciously deepens the one that already exists in part of Colombian society.”
The change in the relationship with migrants aligns with the anti-migration policies of far-right governments on the continent, such as those of Donald Trump in the United States; José Antonio Kast in Chile, and Gabriel Milei in Argentina, who have sought mass deportations to, in theory, improve security in their countries. Rodríguez assures that Colombia cannot address the migratory issue the same way as Argentina, because it shares a live border of 2,219 kilometers with Venezuela. Added to this is the complex relationship with the Venezuelan government led by Delcy Rodríguez. “Colombia is a very complex country where migrants have also been victims of illegal actors.”
Andrés Sampayo, doctor in Political Studies, agrees with the concern about what the government’s decisions against the Venezuelan population in Colombia could generate. “I hope that migratory operations do not become a large-scale persecution of our Venezuelan brothers, who contribute about USD 3 billion annually to the Colombian economy in consumption, taxes, and entrepreneurship,” he wrote on his X account.
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