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So Trump had a fun day on the golf course.
While golfing yesterday, he got the news that Colombia will not be accepting two jets full of repatriated criminals. So he goes on TruthSocial and posts that, immediately, Colombia will get slapped with 25% tariffs, as well as visa revocations for ruling party members.
This causes an immediate reaction from Petro, the unpopular socialist leader of Colombia, who offers to fly convicts back to Colombia in his Presidential jet.
There is much celebration and dunking from Trump supporters.
Not so fast. It turns out Petro might have been drunk, because he later goes on to post this insane rant on Twitter and then threatens the U.S. with retaliatory tariffs.
Now the Democrats are celebrating (because obviously it's good to hurt Trump even if it's bad for America). We are driving Colombians into the arms of China! Who will work our coffee fields? That kind of stuff.
The evening goes on. Trump finishes golfing. Petro sobers up and probably gets some, um, interesting phone calls from prominent Colombians who will have to pull their daughters from American finishing schools. Petro apparently caves, as the White House posts this, announcing that Colombia will accept unlimited flights. No tariffs for now, but the visa restrictions remain in force until Colombia follows through.
It's hard not to see this as a massive win for Trump and for America as a whole. He accomplished more in a few minutes, while golfing, than a normal administration would in weeks. Sometimes you can just do stuff.
MSN reported it like this: Donald Trump starts massive diplomatic crisis with Colombia while playing round of golf.
Was there ever any non-fake disagreement between Colombia and the US here?
Per centrist Twitter, deportation flights to Colombia had been running smoothly in civilian planes, Trump switched to using military planes without asking permission, Colombia turned the planes round due to lack of permission, Trump asked for permission (impolitely), Trump got permission, and everything will continue in an orderly way, apart for both sides spending the length of a round of golf trolling each other on social media.
Whether this is a win for America depends on whether you think being gratuitously boorish when you can get away with it is good diplomacy (because it makes you look tough and dangerous) or bad diplomacy (because it makes you look like a boor). This is a point of genuine partisan disagreement in 21st century America.
Maybe. I'm skeptical of that framing.
For one, how many planes have arrived since Trump took office? Presumably this was the first batch. Colombia might have been okay taking a plane every once in a while. Will they be okay taking 100x as many planes? These will be just the first of many, many flights.
And, of course, the correct response to rude behavior from an ally (sending the military planes, although I haven't verified this was actually abnormal) would be to accept the planes and politely ask for clarification. It would not be to make the leader of the free world lose face.
The bigger issue, of course, is the message this sends to Mexico and other countries that would refuse to take back their own citizens. Trump will immediately escalate and win. Despite what many people on this forum claimed, he is serious about mass deporting hundreds of thousands of violent criminals.
It's not a winning issue for the Dems either. Wait, you are upset that a country doesn't want to take back its own citizens? You are upset that violent felons can't stay in the US? They will just keep losing if they make this an issue even if they say its really about breaches of diplomatic etiquette or whatever.
No - it isn't. That's why I find fakery plausible - the whole thing couldn't have been stage managed better if the goal is to make Trump look good domestically.
If it is 5x, I'll eat my hat. My guess is that Trump puts in comparable numbers to Obama ("removals" is the best approximation to "immigrants deported from inside the US, not turned back at the border" and the number peaked at 432k in 2013) but both the MSM and right-wing Twitter make a lot of noise about it as if the number was unprecedented. Mostly because that is what happened in the first term. That delivers the best possible results for Trump politically - he is seen to be clamping down on immigration, which is popular, but nobody's nanny or landscape crew gets deported.
I'll agree that the Trump admin is grabbing the low-hanging fruit right now.
There are an estimated 1 million illegal aliens who are violent felons who can be deported without much blowback. Most of these came over in the Biden wave, and conveniently, the federal government already knew where many of them were. So it was pretty easy to grab and deport them once we got a competent administration.
Going after nannies and such is a different game altogether and I doubt they will.
But that doesn't matter much in my mind. Because Trump's words and actions will prevent millions of people from entering the country, and will result in millions more self-deporting. This is greatly superior to forced deportations.
That number can't be right. CBP says about 20,000 per year:
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics/criminal-noncitizen-statistics
Which would be about 2 months of Trump deportations at current rates.
So an immigrant with a criminal record in US databases is arrested at the border, and then gives the border patrol his real name, birthdate, national ID number, etc... so they can look up his crimes in their database.
Yeah, I can see that number being less than 20,000 per year. It's remarkable that it's that high, but criminals be dumb. Or maybe they (accurately?) believed that previous felony convictions wouldn't matter and they'd get released into the US anyway.
Oh right. My bad. Let's do an estimate instead. The violent crime rate in the US is 380 per 100,000 (Wikipedia, 2022), with the most violent "state" being DC at 812 per 100,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_violent_crime_rate
Assuming deportations have not been enforced for four years and no multiple-offenders, it would take a population of 65 million illegal aliens to generate 1 million violent criminals at the US average, the base population of illegal aliens would be 31 million illegal aliens at DC's violent crime rate.
The standard estimate of illegal alien number in the US was 11 million in 2022. However, 'alien encounters' were three times higher between 2021 and 2024 than between 2021 and 2017. https://homeland.house.gov/2024/10/24/startling-stats-factsheet-fiscal-year-2024-ends-with-nearly-3-million-inadmissible-encounters-10-8-million-total-encounters-since-fy2021/
But as we learned during the VP debates, asylum seekers were not considered illegal under the Biden admin. In 2022 there were 1M applications for asylum, in 2023 there were 1.1M, and in 2024 there were 1.5M asylum applications. So that might be another 4M people.
So if I had to guess, there are 15 to 20M illegal aliens in the US at the end of 2024, which implies much less than 660k violent felon illegal aliens.
You need to correct for the fact that Latin America has a violent crime rate that is multiples of the US. Also what percentage of illegals are young males?
I will concede that even if, statistically, we can estimate that 1 million illegals are violent criminals, we don't know exactly which ones they are. Fortunately, we don't have to. We can deport the 22 year old with face tattoos even if we can't prove he committed a crime.
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Source on this figure? This feels kind of high, considering the total number of annual violent crimes in the US is also of the same order of magnitude.
My memory from a JD Vance interview. Please feel free to provide an alternate figure, but consider that they may have committed their crimes in their home country. I'm spending too much time doing source hunts for people.
How many illegals entered during the Biden admin in total? It's difficult to say. They provided stats on "border encounters" which I think is a good floor, assuming that all the people "encountered" were given court dates and sent on their merry way inside the US. But they don't give stats on that either.
I think 15 million is a reasonable total of total illegal immigration during the Biden wave, disproportionately consisting of military age males. And of course crossing the border illegally is going to select for high criminality. A ballpark of 1 million violent felons seems reasonable, especially considering the extreme rates of violent crime in Latin America.
But if you're looking for a nice little stat in a peer-reviewed paper or a government bureau, you probably won't find it, given their extreme ideological bent.
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The whole issue is dumb because they’re only deporting Colombians on these flights, who make up only a tiny percentage of illegal migrants to the US. The big issue is Colombia as a transit hub for people from countless other countries, and those people aren’t being ‘returned’ to Colombia, or anywhere else, any time soon.
It is?
If you intend to get to the US overland from South America, you pretty much have to go through Columbia.
Are there significant land migratory flows to the US from anywhere in South America but Colombia and Venezuela?
Haitians and eastern hemisphere types seem to like flying into Ecuador to walk to the border for some reason.
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Yeah, I'm not going to pretend to have a strong mental model for the President of Colombia but this seems like a stunt to push the line and see how much you can get away with. And that sort of thing spreads.
If the military planes were the issue why approve and then suddenly cancel while the flight is in mid-air except to make a point? There must have been a bunch of less visible ways to do this.
I think someone got high on #Resistance copium and didnt realize this isn't 2016.
People can spew whatever line they want about migrants not being criminals in their own country, but it is a bit optimistic to expect to scuttle a US Presidential priority without consequences.
That said, now that Trump has his "Day 1" photoshoot maybe some discretion is advisable. As you say, if he actually gets his druthers the planes won't stop. The smoother it goes the better.
I’m not sure what the internal political situation in Colombia is at the moment, but I expect there’s lots of pressure on the president to “stand up to Trump” in some way. Hence the aforementioned Spanish-language Twitter rant.
It reminds me a bit of ritual tribal warfare. Everyone gets dressed up, lines up on opposite sides of a valley, shakes their spears and yells at each other for a few hours, then everybody goes home satisfied that they really showed the outgroup who’s boss this time.
As I said - looks and quacks like a worked shoot. Trump upsets an arrangement which is working just fine (120 deportation flights to Colombia in civilian planes in 2024) in order to look tough for a domestic audience (the military! deporting illegals, handcuffed!) and get noisily applauded by friendly media, Petro noisily defends the dignity of his citizens (the point of sending Colombian planes at his expense is that the particular group of Colombian deportees who have attracted media attention are not handcuffed, so his friendly media can nosily applaud him for that), and then things carry on as usual.
I don't think anyone actually cares about the military vs civilian planes issue, although the Colombians get to stand on their dignity about the US needing permission to operate military planes in Colombian airspace.
I'm pretty sure this happened after Trump made his threats, which would make it a face-saving measure.
I think he just overplayed a bit. Trump is odious to many so they want to stand up to him, anyone familiar with American politics saw he was very constrained in 2016 both within and outside his administration so I suppose you can be forgiven for thinking you can make hay of a symbolic issue to get a win.
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