High Theater in Bogota

Abelardo de la Espriella has been in office for less than a month, but he already knows how to command the stage. Unveiled during a Sunday security council meeting and broadcast over social media, the Colombian president’s new deportation campaign targets foreign nationals residing in the country without legal standing. “I will not accept any illegal immigrants, wherever they come from,” de la Espriella announced in a public address, adding: “They will have to leave and be deported.”

It is a sharp pivot for a country that previously treated its neighbor's structural collapse with unusual administrative pragmatism. Colombia currently hosts roughly 2.8 million Venezuelans—by far the largest share of the 7.6 million people who have fled Venezuela's economic ruin and political repression over the last decade. While former presidents across the political spectrum, including Juan Manuel Santos, Ivan Duque, and Gustavo Petro, maintained integration pathways such as the Temporary Protection Permit, de la Espriella is choosing a different script. He has aligned his approach with the hardline anti-immigration stance of US President Donald Trump.

The operational reality, however, is bound to test the new administration's ambitions. The government intends to start its crackdown with a pilot project in the northern coastal city of Barranquilla, home to an estimated 182,000 Venezuelans. Officially, the government claims it will prioritize individuals who have committed crimes before turning its attention to the estimated 500,000 migrants whose legal status remains unregularized.

Opposition lawmakers were quick to highlight the campaign's structural flaws. Congresswoman Maria del Mar Pizarro pointed out that without meaningful border security or intelligence operations against organized crime, state-funded deportations across Colombia's porous 2,200-kilometer border accomplish very little. The government pays for the transportation, and deportees simply walk back across the frontier. Leftist Senator Ivan Cepeda, who lost to de la Espriella in June's runoff election, accused the president of weaponizing xenophobia while failing to defend Colombian migrants facing deportation from the United States.

For the migrant community, the shift introduces immediate friction. Representatives from advocacy groups like Fundacion Hermanos Caminantes note that a vast number of undocumented residents are irregular not by choice, but because of administrative backlogs in processing protection permits or lost documentation. Confounding administrative inefficiency with criminal intent makes for convenient political optics, but it does little to address the root causes of regional displacement.

Venezuela's hyperinflation and economic decay—driven by years of mismanagement under the ruling United Socialist Party, though Caracas attributes the crisis to US economic sanctions—continue to push citizens across the border. Whether de la Espriella can realistically deport hundreds of thousands of people across an unpoliced wilderness remains doubtful. What is clear is that loud declarations of law and order are always far easier to deliver than actual state capacity.

Written by Martina Kirchner martina.kirchner@alpineweekly.com