Colombia's new far-right president orders immigration crackdown amid earthquake crisis

Abelardo de la Espriella, Colombia's newly installed far-right president, stood before his cabinet in Barranquilla on a Sunday in late August and announced what he framed as a necessary correction: the country would begin hunting down undocumented immigrants this very week. The millionaire former lawyer, in office for just over two weeks, ordered police and migration authorities to coordinate operations targeting people living in the country without proper papers, with priority given to those with criminal records. He deployed the language of his political ally across the Atlantic, declaring that from this moment forward it would be "Colombians first, Colombians second and Colombians third." The timing was stark. Colombia was still reeling from a 7.4-magnitude earthquake that had struck on August 10, killing more than 300 people and rendering more than 30,000 homes uninhabitable. As rescue efforts continued and displacement camps filled, the new president was pivoting toward enforcement.

The announcement represented a sharp break from migration policy that had held steady across Colombia for more than a decade, surviving changes in government from both the right and the left. That older framework had opened space for migrants, particularly those fleeing Venezuela's deepening humanitarian collapse. Of the 2.8 million Venezuelans now living in Colombia, roughly 848,000 remain in irregular status—without the documentation required by law. Among them are 193,000 children and adolescents. De la Espriella did not name Venezuelans explicitly in his Sunday remarks, but the math was unmistakable: they represent approximately 90 percent of all migrants in the country.

De la Espriella's campaign had centered on a promise to wage what he called an iron-fist war against criminal organizations. In his cabinet announcement, he extended that rhetoric to immigration, declaring all gangs involved in drug trafficking, illegal mining, extortion and smuggling to be "terrorists" who would be defeated "by reason or by force." Yet the immigration order itself cast a wider net than criminal enforcement alone. It targeted anyone whose paperwork was not in order, regardless of whether they had broken any law. Under Colombian law, being in the country without proper documentation is not itself a crime; the legal term is "irregular situation," not illegality. De la Espriella's language blurred that distinction.

The order drew immediate criticism from the political left and from human rights advocates. María José Pizarro Rodríguez, a leftwing senator, reposted the president's announcement and asked pointedly whether he was proposing "a Colombian ICE against fellow Latin Americans," invoking the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. She called the deportation order "pure xenophobia and aporophobia"—fear of the poor—and argued instead for regularizing migrants' status, noting that thousands of them work and contribute to the economy. The criticism highlighted a deeper tension: de la Espriella was not the first far-right leader in the region to tighten immigration rules. Argentina's Javier Milei and Chile's José Antonio Kast had pursued similar policies. But Colombia's scale of migration, and the vulnerability of those affected, made the stakes particularly acute.

There were also practical questions about whether the government could actually execute what the president had ordered. Reporting from the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo suggested that sources inside the migration department believed the agency lacked sufficient staff to carry out the operations de la Espriella had promised. The country was simultaneously managing earthquake recovery, with resources stretched thin across rescue, shelter, and reconstruction. Whether the new president's immigration crackdown would proceed as announced, or whether it would collide with the messy reality of capacity and competing urgencies, remained to be seen.