Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella called for a crackdown on illegal immigration this week, marking a stark departure from his predecessors’ focus on integration over deportation.

De la Espriella, who took office earlier this month, directed the national immigration agency to collaborate with the police in order to carry out sweeping immigration enforcement operations. 

The president called for the immigration crackdown to focus on the immediate deportation of two targets, first those committing crimes and second those who have not “regularized their status.” 

“I will not accept any illegal immigrants, wherever they come from,” de la Espriella said at a security council meeting in Barranquilla, adding that “it is a political decision I am taking responsibility for.”

De la Espriella’s emphasis on the deportation of people without regular status — meaning they do not have a visa or permit authorizing them to stay in the country — effectively upends years of Colombian immigration policy that had transcended political ideology in Colombia. 

Though de la Espriella did not single them out in his remarks, the policy will have the largest impact on Venezuelans, who make up the majority of the country’s immigrants and who share a 1,378-mile land border with Colombia. 

Amid an economic crisis that roiled their home country, millions of Venezuelans have migrated to Colombia since 2015, according to the United Nations. Though estimates vary, they generally suggest that more than 500,000 Venezuelans currently live in Colombia without regular status.

Right wing former President Iván Duque announced in 2021 that Venezuelans would be eligible for a new 10-year protected status. It was a move without precedent in the region and has led to about 2.3 million Venezuelans receiving temporary residency in Colombia. Regularization efforts slowed however under President Gustavo Petro, de la Espriella’s leftwing predecessor who restored relations with Venezuela’s regime under President Nicolás Maduro.

Juan Carlos Viloria Doria, vice president of the nongovernmental organization Venezolanos en Barranquilla, told Latin America Reports that anyone who commits a crime should be held accountable for it, regardless of whether they are Colombian, Venezuelan or any other nationality. 

Colombia can improve its security without walking back the rights granted to immigrants, he added, and the organization hopes to have a dialogue with the national government as it targets Barranquilla as the pilot city for its enforcement efforts.  

“We agree with the announcement to enforce the law, but we also want to be very clear that we cannot confuse criminality with irregular immigration status,” he said, noting that migrants themselves are often victims of the very criminal groups that de la Espriella’s government is targeting.   

Rodrigo Lara Restrepo, the Minister of the Interior of Colombia, clarified in an interview with BluRadio that the president’s order was not directed at Venezuelans who arrived in the worst of the crisis from 2019 through 2021 and were able to regularize their status. 

Instead, the administration’s target are the “the criminal networks that are profiting from the smuggling of illegal migrants in areas such as the Darien,” he said. 

De la Espriella now follows a track already taken by other right-wing leaders throughout the Americas who have vowed tougher enforcement of immigration laws and linked immigration to rising crime, including U.S. President Donald Trump, Chilean President José Antonio Kast and Argentine President Javier Milei. 

De la Espriella’s rhetoric even directly mirrored that of Trump, whose “America First” slogan has been a hallmark of his campaigns for president. On Sunday, de la Espriella pledged “Colombians first, Colombians second and Colombians third.” 

The president’s political opponents were quick to draw the comparison between Trump and de la Espriella. 

María José Pizarro Rodríguez, a leader of the Pacto Histórico whose candidate lost to de la Espriella in the recent election, questioned on social media whether the president is “proposing a Colombian ICE against fellow Latin Americans.”

“Instead of going after those fleeing poverty and violence, regularize their status. There are thousands of migrants who work hard and contribute to the economies of their host countries,” she wrote. 

Polls indicate that Colombians’ views on immigration have grown more negative in recent years, with nearly four in five of those who responded to a Latinobarómetro survey in 2023 saying that migrants were harmful to the country. 

But how quickly de la Espriella’s government will be able to carry out any large-scale immigration enforcement operation remains to be seen.

Featured image description: Abelardo de la Espriella speaking at an event after his election.

Featured image credit: Abelardo de la Espriella via Facebook.