Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
(CNN) — Donald Trump claimed an early victory for a coercive foreign policy based on tariffs and hard power on Sunday after announcing Colombia had backed down in a dispute over migrant repatriation flights.
The president had earlier unveiled swift and painful punishment, including huge tariffs, on the US ally in his most overt attempt yet to make an example of a nation that crossed him and to assert dominance in the Western Hemisphere.
The crisis erupted when Colombian President Gustavo Petro blocked US military flights carrying undocumented migrants from landing, in a hitch for the mass deportation operation meant to honor one of Trump’s most high-profile campaign promises.
The US president jumped at a chance to show his supporters how tough he can be and to demonstrate to other countries in Latin America the price of resisting migrant repatriations.
After hours of tensions with Bogota, the White House said Colombia had agreed to accept migrant flights, including on military aircraft, and that tariffs would be held off pending its implementation of the deal.
“Today’s events make clear to the world that America is respected again,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement late Sunday. “President Trump will continue to fiercely protect our nation’s sovereignty, and he expects all other nations of the world to fully cooperate in accepting the deportation of their citizens illegally present in the United States.”
Colombia’s foreign minister soon confirmed that US deportation flights had resumed. Petro’s reversal represents a concession to US power and to Trump’s aggressive personal style. It is also likely to embolden administration officials who see tariff threats not simply as a traditional device in trade disputes but as a tool to intimidate other nations, including longtime US allies, across a broader set of issues.
Still, the spat with Colombia was also a reminder of how Trump’s hardline approach will cause massive global disruption. The US president has already browbeaten Canada and Mexico over border issues, sought to force Denmark to sell Greenland, and threatened to take back the Panama Canal.
Four years of such tactics could harm US global relationships and harden attitudes to Americans among foreign populations. The Colombia dispute quickly got the attention of China, which is seeking to increase its influence in Washington’s backyard — underscoring the potential downside for the United States if Trump chooses incessant confrontation that alienates key regional nations.
Trump is wielding power all over the map
Trump’s victory over Colombia capped the first week of his presidency, during which he used intimidation as a device to stamp his power on the United States at home and to sharply change the nation’s path abroad.
On Sunday, for instance, Trump’s new administration launched a deportation blitz in Chicago that will spread countrywide in the latest highly visible sign of his desire to quickly get results.
White House border czar Tom Homan told CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez Sunday that the new multiagency approach on immigration enforcement was a “game-changer.”
“Today’s operation was all of government. President Trump has put all of government on this issue,” he said. Nearly 1,000 people were arrested in the sweep Sunday, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
This followed another stunning example of the new president wielding aggressive executive authority after he fired more than a dozen watchdog officials in key government agencies Friday night.
The purge is part of Trump’s attempts to remake the federal government in line with a long-held conservative belief that the federal bureaucracy always frustrates Republican presidents as they try to implement electoral mandates.
But since the agency inspectors general report waste, fraud and abuse to Congress, the move is being criticized by Democrats as an abuse of power and a sign of Trump’s cavalier regard for government ethics. And even some top Republicans complained the president should have complied with the law by giving Congress 30 days’ notice of the dismissals.
“I think he should have done that,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
But the South Carolina Republican asked: “Is it OK for him to put people in place that he thinks can carry out his agenda? Yes. He won the election. What do you expect him to do, just leave everybody in place in Washington before he got elected?” Graham added: “He feels like the government hasn’t worked very well for the American people.”
Another intense week looms for Trump
Trump has hinted that he could be a transformational leader showing energy and focus and acting quickly to implement his campaign promises, especially on immigration. His agent of disruption in the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, was sworn in as defense secretary Saturday after Vice President JD Vance cast the deciding Senate vote on his controversial confirmation.
But Trump has also taken steps that could alienate many of the swing voters who sent him back to power.
His blanket pardons of January 6, 2021, rioters — including those convicted of violent offenses — shocked many Republicans. And his decision to strip security details from former aides who criticized him, including several who have been threatened by Iran, revealed an obsession with past grievances that sometimes distracts from his political goals.
Trump said last week that voters were more concerned with immigration than with high grocery prices. But Republican hopes of clinging to their narrow House majority in next year’s midterm elections may rest on him making tangible economic progress.
This makes the president’s meeting with Republican lawmakers on Monday at his Doral golf resort in South Florida especially important, as the meeting will focus on how to navigate his agenda, including tax cuts and funds for his mass deportation program, through Congress.
Sudden showdown with Colombia underscores hazards of immigration purge
The attempted resistance from Colombia created an immediate test for the new US president that was sure to be watched throughout the region.
Trump’s initial response was crushing. He ordered immediate emergency tariffs of 25% on Colombian goods that he said would rise to 50% within a week. The US also imposed a “travel ban” for Colombian citizens and revoked visas for Colombian officials, among other measures.
Trump warned on Truth Social: “These measures are just the beginning. We will not allow the Colombian Government to violate its legal obligations with regard to the acceptance and return of the Criminals they forced into the United States!”
But Petro had his own response on X: “Trump, I don’t really like traveling to the US, it’s a bit boring.” The leftist president even suggested that Trump considers “me an inferior race and I’m not, nor is any Colombian.”
Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Petro may have had his reasons to pick an early fight with Trump — not least amid dissatisfaction with the existing trading relationship with the US, a longtime military ally. Berg added that Petro might think “he’s going to benefit from juxtaposing himself to the United States and being seen as fighting for the dignity of Latin America.”
Still, long-term 50% tariffs on Colombia from the US, its largest trading partner, could be disastrous. And hours before the White House announcement that Colombia had come around, Berg predicted that Colombia would have to quietly come to an agreement with Trump. “They’re in for a rude awakening if they think they can just survive 50% tariffs and everything else that Trump said he was going to do — sanctions on banks and investments and everything else,” he said.
The head of the Colombo American Chamber of Commerce, Maria Claudia Lacouture, wrote on X that 25% US tariffs would be immediate and devastating. “We call for sanity, dialogue and common sense, prioritizing diplomatic channels to overcome this serious crisis in the shortest possible time. Calm is important for all the actors involved,” she wrote.
US trade in goods and services with Colombia totaled $53.5 billion in 2022, according to the US Trade Representative — a small fraction of America’s commercial relationships with its top partners such as Canada and China. Still, a prolonged trade war with Colombia could have had one tangible impact: making breakfast in America more expensive if already soaring prices for eggs were accompanied by hikes in the price of a key Colombian export — coffee.
Trump’s slap down of Petro is the most significant play yet from his administration on Latin America.
Later this week, new Secretary State Marco Rubio will visit Panama, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic with US demands to halt migrant flows and increase deportations from US soil at the top his agenda.
More broadly, the next four years are likely to intensify a geopolitical contest between the United States and China for influence in Latin America. Trump has already alienated Panama by falsely claiming that Beijing controls the Panama Canal, and he’s threatened to take back sovereignty of the key waterway between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.
It was no coincidence, therefore, that China’s ambassador to Colombia chose Sunday afternoon — as diplomatic insults flew between Trump and Petro — to point out an interview in which he recalled that Colombia’s foreign minister said last year that relations between Bogota and Beijing were at their “best moment” in 45 years.
And the reality that the rest of the world has a say — however aggressively Trump wields power — may also complicate his ambitious plans to reshape the Middle East following his weekend suggestion that he could “clean out” war-ravaged Gaza and send refugees to Jordan and Egypt. Such an idea, although embraced by the Israeli far-right, is a nonstarter for the key US allies and could scupper his top regional goal — getting Arab states lined up alongside Israel in an anti-Iran front.
Trump team cranks up new immigration blitz
The administration’s new multiagency immigration enforcement operation in Chicago started as ICE field offices have been told by the new administration to meet a quota of 75 arrests per day, according to two sources.
The Trump team last week told federal prosecutors to investigate officials in Democratic-run cities and states like Chicago and Illinois if they resist the new immigration enforcement efforts. This raised the possibility that the mass deportations could trigger the most serious clash between federal and state and local power in years.
Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker said on “State of the Union” that he shared the administration’s goal of deporting violent criminals but raised doubts about the administration’s approach.
“If that’s who they’re picking up, we’re all for it,” Pritzker said. But, he added: “They’re going after people who are law-abiding, who are holding down jobs, who have families here, who may have been here for a decade or two decades.”
Whether that backfires politically remains to be seen.
After meeting on Monday with House Republicans, whose tiny majority has enormous implications for Trump’s agenda, the president returns to Washington, where his desire to swiftly consolidate power means the second week of his second term will surely be as busy and jolting as the first week.
The-CNN-Wire
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