Todd Bensman: Colombia’s Immediate Caving to Accepting Deportation Flights Sets the Tone for Other Countries’ Compliance with Accepting Back Migrants

Todd Bensman

Todd Bensman, a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, said Colombia’s compliance to accept U.S. deportation flights returning Colombian nationals back to the South American country when faced with tariffs and sanctions sets the tone for other countries when it comes to accepting future deportation flights.

On Sunday, hours after President Donald Trump announced a series of penalties including tariffs, visa sanctions, and travel restrictions on Colombia after the country denied entry of U.S. military deportation flights, the South American country caved and announced it would accept the return of Colombian nationals from the U.S.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro even went as far to offer his presidential plane to facilitate the return of migrants from the U.S., as previously reported by The Tennessee Star.

Bensman said Colombia’s immediate reversal of its initial move to not accept deportation flights of its own people served as a “punching bag” for “any other country in the world that refuses to take back our deportees.”

“They’re all going to take them back or they’re all going to be in smoking ruins,” Bensman explained on Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.

Bensman said Trump’s handling of Colombia’s initial refusal to accept deportation flights served as a “very important” and “early” move to “draw red lines” when it comes to how the U.S. will approach and enforce its immigration policy moving forward under the new administration.

“Our deportation program is going to be a slow ramp up. So we have to rebuild the infrastructure to do it and we’re going to need those countries to all be very agreeable about our returns on military aircraft,” Bensman explained.

“This was important because we have to have all of these countries around the world in Africa and Asia, get ready to take our transports. I think that was accomplished now with Columbia. Thank you President Petro,” Bensman added.

In addition to a ramp up of deportation flights, Bensman said other significant changes the Trump administration is carrying out to address illegal immigration include reopening detention facilities that were closed under the Biden administration and hiring more ICE agents.

“This is going to ramp up over time. Numbers don’t seem that impressive and they won’t for a little while because we have to rebuild the infrastructure. We lost about a thousand ICE agents who were demoralized for being chained to their desk during the Biden administration and the number is down to 5,000. So they need to have 10,000 agents to be able to do this. In the meantime, they are pulling DEA agents and HSI agents and the military down on the border so that they can put border patrol into it,” Bensman explained.

“They’ve also got to get detention facilities up and running. The Biden administration closed every family detention facility in America and shut down all the private contracts for private detention facilities and deals with county sheriffs and jails and all of that. They have to rebuild and restore all that. It’s going to take a little while,” Bensman added.

Watch the full interview:

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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.

 

 

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