Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro has claimed that U.S. officials have revoked his visa, a claim the State Department would not immediately confirm.
Petro was speaking during a televised meeting of his cabinet called to address an outbreak of yellow fever, according to The City Paper Bogotá. The president spent several days in January engulfed in a conflict with the Trump administration about accepting Colombian nationals deported from the United States, before backing down.
“I can’t go [to the US] anymore because I believe they took away my visa,” Petro said, chuckling. Then, apparently aiming a shot at Donald Trump, he added: “I didn’t really need a visa, but anyway, I’ve already seen Donald Duck several times, so I’ll go see other things.”
While it was not immediately clear whether the Colombian president was zinging his U.S. counterpart or the Walt Disney character, Trump has been mocked as “Donald Duck” before, notably by his sometime ally Chris Christie. In 2023 the former New Jersey governor dubbed Trump “Donald Duck” for refusing to take part in debates with his challengers for the Republican presidential nomination.
Petro is not thought to have met Trump, although he visited the White House in 2023 to meet then-President Joe Biden.
A State Department spokespersondeclined to comment to The Independent on Tuesday, citing the confidentiality of visa records. An official with the US Embassy in Bogotá told a local news service that “no formal notification of visa revocation” had been issued.
But the agency threatened escalation with Petro’s government in January, when the US halted new visa applications for Colombian nationals. Applicants were handed letters informing them that their appointments at the embassy were canceled “due to the Colombian government’s refusal to accept repatriation flights of Colombian nationals”, according to the Associated Press.
During the dispute, the Colombian president balked over the usage of US military AC-130s for the transportation of Colombians, who he argued were being treated like criminals without being convicted of violating the law.
“I do not authorize the entry of North American planes carrying Colombian migrants into our territory,” Petro said on X. “The U.S. must establish a protocol of dignified treatment of migrants before we receive them.”
“A migrant is not a criminal and should be treated with the dignity a human being deserves,” he said. “We will receive our nationals in civilian airplanes, without treating them as criminals. Colombia must be respected.”
Trump responded with a slew of retaliatory measures, including hiked tariffs and a promise to pursue “Visa Sanctions on all Party Members, Family Members, and Supporters of the Colombian Government” as well as a “Travel Ban and immediate Visa Revocations [for] Colombian Government Officials, and all Allies and Supporters.”
Petro later relented and began allowing deportation flights back into the country. He remains a vocal critic, however, of Trump’s deportation policy, including the removal of Venezuelan migrants labeled Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT megaprison.
“No democratic-minded person in Latin America can accept that all of the Venezuelan people in exile are criminalized because of the crimes of the so-called ‘Tren de Aragua,'” wrote Petro on Twitter this week.
A Pew Research Group analysis found that there were nearly 200,000 Colombian nationals living in the United States without legal status as of 2022. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has accelerated a mass deportation program which was once promised to be focused on removing convicted criminals – amid a GOP-led effort to stoke fear about crimes, including murders, committed by migrants living in the US illegally.
Trump continues to insist that his administration is removing dangerous criminals, and his Homeland Security and White House officials have resorted to amplifying smears and outright falsehoods against migrants caught up in high-profile cases.
But the two contested deportation flights carrying around 200 Colombian nationals back to their home country earlier this year did not appear to include anyone convicted of a violent offense.
The flights instead carried at least 20 children and several pregnant women. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, at a news briefing that month, declared that the lack of focus on violent criminals was irrelevant – all migrants who did not enter the country through ports of entry are criminals, in the administration’s view.
“I know the last administration didn’t see it that way, so it’s a big culture shift in our nation to view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal, but that’s exactly what they are,” she said.
