Colombia's new president orders deportation drive, drawing xenophobia backlash
Bogota, Colombia — Less than a month after taking office, Colombia's new president has ordered a deportation crackdown on foreigners living in the country without authorization, drawing sharp condemnation from opposition leaders and migrant groups who call the policy inhumane and xenophobic.
President Abelardo de la Espriella announced the operation Sunday during a security council meeting, instructing police to begin field operations as early as this week. The plan is expected to hit Venezuelans hardest; they make up the overwhelming majority of Colombia's migrant population.
"I will not accept any illegal immigrants, wherever they come from," de la Espriella said in a video posted on X on Sunday evening. "They will have to leave and be deported. It is a political decision I am taking responsibility for."
The far-right president, sworn in earlier this month, said the first phase would target migrants accused of crimes, followed by those whose immigration status has not been regularized. He did not name any specific nationality, but the OECD estimates that roughly 95 percent of Colombia's migrant population is Venezuelan.
About 2.8 million Venezuelans live in Colombia, the largest Venezuelan diaspora in the world. Colombian migration authorities say nearly 2 million have Temporary Protection Permits, while an estimated 500,000 lack authorization; many had permits that expired.
De la Espriella, a political newcomer and former lawyer, campaigned on a promise to confront illegal immigration and has closely aligned himself with US President Donald Trump, whose administration has carried out its own mass deportation effort. Sunday's announcement signaled a sharp break from previous Colombian governments, which for years tried to open legal pathways for Venezuelans fleeing economic collapse and political repression.
The backlash was immediate. Ivan Cepeda, a leftist senator who narrowly lost to de la Espriella in June's presidential runoff and leads the Historic Pact, the largest bloc in Congress, accused the president of adding xenophobia to a record of authoritarian and discriminatory policies.
"Today, de la Espriella has added xenophobia to all the authoritarian, despotic and discriminatory traits of his policies," Cepeda wrote on X. He went further, saying de la Espriella was "bold enough to target migrants from Latin American countries in Colombia, yet cowardly when it comes to protecting our fellow migrants in the United States."
Historic Pact congresswoman Maria del Mar Pizarro also questioned the motivation behind the crackdown. In an interview with Al Jazeera, she distinguished between criminality and immigration status.
"Foreign nationals who commit crimes must be prosecuted," she said. "But persecuting and deporting someone — simply because their immigration status is not in order — is populism, not security."
Pizarro noted that the Colombia-Venezuela border stretches roughly 2,200 kilometers (1,370 miles), much of it open. Deported Venezuelans, she argued, could easily find their way back.
"Without border control, legalization and intelligence efforts against criminal gangs, the government pays for the deportation, and the problem returns," she said.
The deportation operation is expected to begin with a pilot program in Barranquilla, a coastal city home to an estimated 182,000 Venezuelans. There, members of the diaspora worry the crackdown will reinforce stereotypes that migrants are criminals.
"We must not confuse irregular immigration status with criminality. They are two completely different things," said Juan Carlos Viloria Doria, vice president of Venezuelans in Barranquilla, a migrant advocacy group. He backed prosecuting people who commit crimes, but insisted the law should apply equally "independent of nationality."
Viloria also warned that some deportees could face political persecution once returned to Venezuela. UN experts and human rights groups have repeatedly accused Venezuela's government of arbitrary detention and torture of dissidents. For many migrants, he said, leaving was a matter of survival.
"We have people who left because they believed their lives, their freedom, or their safety were at risk," Viloria explained. "Added to that are the economic, social and humanitarian conditions that Venezuela still faces."
Venezuela sits atop the world's largest oil reserves, but its economy contracted sharply and hyperinflation wiped out savings over the past decade. Critics of the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela say corruption and mismanagement gutted public services; officials in Caracas blame US sanctions for choking oil revenue, trade and foreign investment.
Since 2014, about 7.6 million Venezuelans have left the country, according to the UN. Many settled in Colombia, drawn by family ties and relative stability.
Ronald Vergara arrived in 2016 and founded Fundacion Hermanos Caminantes, an NGO supporting newly arrived migrants. He said a deportation drive would be devastating for a community built around work and survival.
"It would truly be inhumane to deport people who came here to survive and to work — decent people, who account for the majority of us," he told Al Jazeera.
Vergara waited 10 years for his Temporary Protection Permit because of bureaucratic delays, and stayed in Colombia without stable documents much of that time. "I always felt excluded. I was never able to get a job that paid a decent wage," he recalled. He also described losing legal status through no fault of migrants' own — if identity cards were lost or stolen. His 17-year-old son, he said, still lacks a PPT and cannot graduate from high school without it.
De la Espriella's announcement marks a historic rupture with nearly a decade of Colombian migration policy. When the Venezuelan exodus first surged, Bogota responded with humanitarian permits and integration efforts. In 2017, President Juan Manuel Santos created a two-year special permission scheme and stepped up border aid. His successor, Ivan Duque, closed the border to vehicles in 2019 and cut diplomatic ties with Venezuela, but still introduced the Temporary Protection Permit in 2021 to regularize thousands. Under leftist President Gustavo Petro, relations thawed and pro-migrant policies continued. De la Espriella's victory ended Petro's term this year.
Ronal Rodriguez, a spokesman for the Venezuela Observatory at Bogota's Rosario University, said the new administration has interrupted a long-standing bipartisan trend.
"Everyone had a favorable stance toward migration and, in particular, used language that promoted integration," Rodriguez said. "Unfortunately, I believe that this ends — for the moment — with what President Abelardo de la Espriella is now saying."
Few details of the deportation platform have been released, and it remains unclear how the government will pay for, staff or enforce the operations. Rodriguez said de la Espriella could still back down, and he hopes the president will reconsider and "return to the Colombian government's policy of integration."