As Trump’s War on Migrants Transcends Borders, Resistance Grows in Latin America

Colombia, along with Mexico, Brazil and Honduras, are already resisting the Trump administration’s neo-imperial regional aspirations.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a former political prisoner who played a leading role in Colombia’s revolutionary movement, is the first head of state both in the region and globally who has challenged Donald Trump directly, pushing back against the Trump administration’s treatment of Colombian immigrants facing deportation.

Petro was ultimately successful (at least for now) in resisting the U.S.’s military deportation flights, demanding humane treatment for those deported, and at least initially in securing unprecedented U.S concessions involving the return of Colombian migrants on Colombian aircraft, including Petro’s official plane, as honored guests. Petro also personally welcomed those who landed later, in images of concrete solidarity that will long resonate in the region. Unsurprisingly, mainstream and right-wing media in the U.S. and elsewhere still have insisted that Colombia “caved in” or “surrendered.”

A heated initial exchange between Petro and Trump on X (formerly Twitter) included threats involving reciprocal imposition of steep tariffs and a series of retaliatory commercial and visa measures by the U.S. that heralded an unprecedented regional trade war and Colombia’s potentially ruinous destabilization. This foreshadows what might unfold soon in related contexts such as Mexico and Canada.

MAGA’s Domestic War Against Migrants and Its Hemispheric Dimensions

The new Trump administration’s signature policies of mass detention and mass deportation have become the most concrete expressions of the hegemonic pretensions — and hemispheric projections — of the “America First” ideology in its current phase.

This includes Trump’s threats to reestablish U.S. control over the Panama Canal by force, in violation of the 1977 Torrijos-Carter treaties and the UN Charter, and the administration’s decision to revive the use of the U.S military base at Guantánamo — which Cuba has long argued is an illegally occupied Cuban territory — as a detention center for as many as 30,000 migrants. Guantánamo is best known as the site of the notorious U.S. torture center where hundreds have been held without trial for their supposed links to 9/11.

However, many don’t recall that this base was also the site where hundreds of migrants were held in deplorable conditions by the U.S. in the 1990s after being intercepted by the Coast Guard in international waters as they fled the impact of U.S. interventionist policies in Cuba and Haiti. More recently, smaller numbers have been detained indefinitely at the Migrant Operations Center there, in “prison-like conditions where refugees are trapped without access to the outside world in a punitive system operated by the Departments of Homeland Security and State,” according to a September 2024 report issued by the International Refugee Assistance Project.

A surge in unprecedented U.S. military deportation flights, combined with regional indignation over the longstanding inhumane treatment of migrants deported from the U.S., has finally become more widely visible through Colombia and Brazil’s pushback, as well as Mexico’s apparent behind-the-scenes denial of landing permission and airspace to military deportation flights.

Organizations such as Witness at the Border have long tracked the frequency, volume and destinations of U.S. deportation flights, thanks to the extraordinarily dedicated work of my colleague Tom Cartwright. The Haitian Bridge Alliance, Cameroon Advocacy Network, and independent researchers such as Sarah Towle have carefully documented how these flights are characterized by cruel and abusive treatment of migrants in U.S. custody that is tantamount to torture, and may be equivalent to forced disappearances.

Both torture and disappearances of this kind are recognized as crimes against humanity pursuant to well-established international law, such as the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and relevant UN human rights conventions. It is these kinds of injustices that have provided the spark for a potentially historic step forward in Latin American regional resistance to U.S. hegemony.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro is the first head of state both in the region and globally who has challenged Donald Trump directly, pushing back against the Trump administration’s treatment of Colombian immigrants facing deportation.

An emergency regional summit to develop a unified response to the Trump administration was called on very short notice by Honduras and then cancelled without detailed explanation, reportedly because of an insufficient basis of consensus about next steps. Honduras holds the current presidency pro tempore of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC, initials in Spanish). Honduran President Xiomara Castro will soon be succeeded in this rotating post by Petro, providing him with an even broader platform.

CELAC is intended as the most recent vehicle for the regional defense of Latin American sovereignty against all of the recurrent forms of U.S. intervention that have chacterized the history of the hemisphere since the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. It has the potential to align much more closely with the Bolivarian vision of continental unity free of U.S. hegemony and intervention than the U.S.-dominated “Pan-Americanism” of the Organization of American States.

This builds on the history of Latin American initiatives such as the Panama Canal treaties and the Contadora and Esquipulas peace processes, which were ultimately successful in laying the basis for ending the intertwined Central American wars of the 1980s in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. These wars were the fruit of the U.S.’s pretensions of regional domination within the framework of the Cold War.

Similarly, the historic Cartagena Declaration of 1984 expanded the definition of refugee status in Latin America and the Caribbean to include those “persons who have fled their countries because their lives, safety or freedom have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order.”

This approach was reaffirmed in December 2024 through the Chile Declaration and Plan of Action. All of this is an integral part of the landscape that MAGA’s neo-imperial project is seeking to reconfigure and ultimately erase.

Background to Recent Events

Colombia was the most explicit in its rejection of military flights and of the abusive conditions of transport of deported migrants, which built on parallel and ultimately convergent Mexican and Brazilian recalcitrance.

Honduras meanwhile reminded the new administration that the military cooperation agreements necessary to maintain the presence of the U.S.’s strategic Soto Cano Air Base — the only one of its kind in Central America — might have to be revisited if Trump moved ahead with mass deportations. Furthermore, officials in both Honduras and Colombia highlighted the possibility of closer relations with China, and Colombian alignment with BRICS as potential alternative routes, in an attempt to distance themselves from the U.S. under Trump.

The deportation flights are crucial propagandistic and logistical elements in the overall machinery of terror (“shock and awe”) that the Trump administration has unleashed against migrant families, communities and our countries of origin.

The haunting images of rows of shackled migrants being loaded onto military cargo planes have spread throughout the world. These are the sacrificial talismans of the new MAGA regime, and are intended to have global resonance.

An emergency regional summit to develop a unified response to the Trump administration was called on very short notice by Honduras and then cancelled without detailed explanation.

The recent diplomatic crisis between the U.S. and Colombia must be understood as a new (potentially regional) trade war which directly reflects the broader international implications of the new administration’s immigration and border policies, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s newly minted role as a global enforcer of these measures. But the crisis must also be viewed within the historical and contemporary context of U.S.-Colombia and U.S.-Latin American relations, including the revival of tensions related to control of the Panama Canal.

Relevant Historical and Contemporary Context

The relevant context ranges from Colombia’s historically central place in U.S. national security and “drug war” strategies (such as “Plan Colombia,” with its disastrous impact on human rights) since the Cold War, to Colombia’s continuing internal armed conflicts and persistent human rights crisis, to its role as a key country of transit from Venezuela to Panama through the Darien Gap.

It was in Colombia that the U.S.’s “national security doctrine” was first tested in Latin America, in what eventually became the longest-lasting, most devastating and labyrinthine of Latin America’s internal armed conflicts, which has been described as the “world’s longest war.” This has led in turn to a still incomplete peace process that includes the international community’s most intricate and wide-ranging transitional justice mechanisms.

Petro has been a leading critic of the human cost of these policies in Colombia and internationally, which in his view have led to a combined total of over a million deaths in Latin America — primarily in Colombia and Mexico — during the last 40 years.

Colombia became the poster child for the genesis of what have become regional drug wars. It then became the primary staging ground for the mutation of its war on drugs into a purported “war on terror” after September 11. This in turn helped legitimize former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s ruthless authoritarian rule between 2002 and 2010. Colombia thus historically served as a test case that laid the foundation for the Trump administration’s current explicit intention of designating drug cartels in states like Mexico and Colombia as threats to MAGA’s conception of “national security,” in order to facilitate armed U.S. intervention.

A key new factor reshaping this landscape is the leftist character of the Petro government and Petro’s regional and global leadership role as Latin America’s most consistently progressive spokesperson. This notably includes Petro’s advocacy for concrete measures of global climate justice, and his insistence on explicitly denouncing the ongoing genocide in Gaza and eventually severing Colombia’s diplomatic relations with Israel. It also includes Petro’s efforts to gradually consolidate an alliance with Mexico and Brazil to varying degrees, based on shared political affinities.

Petro’s government in Colombia is an especially ripe target for the Trump administration, because according to Rubio, it now falls in the same basket as the ideological threats he associates with Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Rubio was especially incensed by Petro’s position on Gaza and his rupture of diplomatic relations with Israel, which he associated with Petro’s allegedly “far-left Marxist” views. It would be surprising if Rubio’s stance towards Petro softened in his new role as secretary of state.

Deportation Flights as a Methodology of Deterrence

The new administration’s focus on the mass detention and mass deportation of migrants constitutes a reloaded version of the murderous doctrine of “prevention through deterrence” that has driven U.S. immigration and border policy since its adoption in 1994.

This strategy has resulted in thousands of migrant deaths at or en route to the U.S.-Mexico border and tens of thousands throughout the world. It is an integral part of the architecture of “externalization” that has characterized migration policies from the U.S.-Mexico border, to the peripheries of the European Union in the Mediterranean, to Africa, the Middle East and Australia.

All of this comes with the trappings implied by the rhetoric of “invasion,” which completes the stigmatization of migrants as inherent, criminal “threats” to what Trump defines as “national security.”

In this way, the “securitization” of immigration and border policy is combined with criminalization, the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border and the extension of U.S. policies terrorizing migrants to Mexico and beyond.

MAGA’s hemispheric vision encompasses Panama’s Darien Gap (adjacent to its long coveted canal) and the borders of Colombia, extending deep into the southern cone of Latin America, and eventually to the “triple border” region where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay converge. This framework also includes the Caribbean and the newly (unilaterally) renamed “Gulf of America,” through similar policies applied to Haiti, Cuba, and insistence on statehood within the U.S. for the colony of Puerto Rico.

Secretary of State Rubio has enthusiastically embraced his new role, which empowers him as the global enforcer of state terror, and as the administration’s neo-imperial regional viceroy, wielding the contemporary version of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Big Stick.” Cuba and Venezuela are the administration’s most enticing targets, along with Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua and Bolivia. But this will be coupled with a domestic war against migrants that has now been globalized and has no borders. Petro’s pushback has for the first time explicitly incorporated the defense of the human rights of migrants from Latin America as a core issue that can help mobilize regional resistance.

The Monroe Doctrine and “Manifest Destiny” have now been reinvigorated into a Trumpian neo-imperialism, exemplified by Rubio’s first tour as secretary of state, with the aim of countering Chinese aspirations for increased trade and influence in the region.

Petro’s overt resistance to the Trump administration’s evident intention to regenerate U.S. domination in Latin America has set a high bar for other regional leaders. Petro has also reminded fellow leaders of the need for regional unity that was first articulated by Simón Bolivar (Colombia’s founding leader) and has been echoed later in contexts ranging from the Cuban and Sandinista revolutions to Mexico’s Zapatistas. At the same time, whatever unfolds along these lines in Latin America will have resonance as well, throughout the Global South.