If anybody had Colombia on their trump Tariff Bingo card, you can cash in your winnings with Vegas tonight (via Regina Garcia Cano and Astrid Suarez at AP News):
The United States and Colombia, long close partners in anti-narcotics efforts, clashed Sunday over the deportation of migrants and imposed tariffs on each other’s goods in a show of what countries could face if they intervene in the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
Presidents Donald Trump and Gustavo Petro, in a series of social media posts, defended their views on migration, with the latter accusing Trump of not treating immigrants with dignity during deportation and announcing a retaliatory 25% increase in Colombian tariffs on U.S. goods.
Earlier, the U.S. president had ordered visa restrictions, 25% tariffs on all Colombian incoming goods, which would be raised to 50% in one week, and other retaliatory measures sparked by Petro’s decision to reject two Colombia-bound U.S. military aircraft carrying migrants.
At issue are the methods of how trump is sending the deportees. We have long-standing agreements in place with various Central and South American nations about returning illegals to their place of origin, but there's supposed to be procedure and protocols and trump reportedly rejects all that. Instead of standard air transport, he's ordered the use of military planes. Instead of going through a evaluation - which takes time - he's deporting people without due process and without informing the other nations of when and where.
Enraging the Colombian government - as well as other nations - is how the deportees are treated: chained up like prisoners instead of people:
Earlier in the day, Petro said his government would not accept flights carrying migrants deported from the U.S. until the Trump administration creates a protocol that treats them with “dignity.” Petro made the announcement in two X posts, one of which included a news video of migrants reportedly deported to Brazil walking on a tarmac with restraints on their hands and feet.
“A migrant is not a criminal and must be treated with the dignity that a human being deserves,” Petro said. “That is why I returned the U.S. military planes that were carrying Colombian migrants... In civilian planes, without being treated like criminals, we will receive our fellow citizens.”
While other nations like Honduras and Guatemala are accepting trump's use of military planes to return deportees, having Central/South American countries reject these attempts are going to create humanitarian dilemmas for the United States.
In the meantime, trump's swift use of tariffs as a stick to beat nations like Colombia into doing his bidding is going to hurt Americans who are relying on that nation's various imported goods... like coffee. While Colombian coffee only makes up 20 percent of our intake, any increase in costs is going to cripple the amount of what we get. With Brazil's market hit by lowered production due to natural disasters, there's already a shortage to where coffee prices have gone up. Are Americans - seriously addicted to coffee - ready to pay $20 a latte at Starbucks?
trump is looking to make an example of Colombia, hoping to bully them with weaponized tariffs into accepting his mass deportation scheme the way he wants it: cruel and clumsy. But all he's doing is signaling to the world that he has no care or concern about what tariffs and trade wars actually do (don't forget, trump thinks trade wars are good, and easy to win). And he's pushing our major trade partners in this hemisphere into shopping for other markets, likely with a China that is eager to supplant the United States in economic dominance... the very thing that's triggering trump's demands to take back the Panama Canal.
In the meantime, trump is ramping up the "mass deportation" plan here at home, with orders getting sent down to ICE departments to reach daily quotas of 1,200 to 1,500 arrests per day. We're talking about pressure on immigration officers to round up at least 50 people an hour, as though locating and targeting undocumented migrants is easy. What's going to happen is that ICE agents will grab anybody who looks Latino and claim they're illegals, even if they have genuine IDs proving they are American citizens.
This is like Stop And Frisk - a shameful and failed practice that's still deployed by police - on steroids, with the horrifying implications that thousands of Americans are going to have their rights and their freedoms denied.
None of this is doing our economy or our citizenry any favors. Both the war on trade and the war on Latinos are going to turn into disasters, and a lot of innocent people are going to get hurt (or even killed).
Welcome back to the trumpian chaos that makes America even worse. Thanks a lot, 77 million trump voters, for fucking us all over.
No comments:
Post a Comment