President Donald Trump hit the ground running on immigration, deploying 1,500 active-duty troops to the southern border and ordering military deportation flights to Central and South America. Two of those flights were to arrive in Colombia on Sunday. Gustavo Petro, the nation's president and a former member of the Marxist M-19 guerrilla group, stopped them from landing. It didn't take long for Trump to remind him that the old guy isn't in charge anymore.
Trump announced "sweeping punitive measures" against Colombia, including "an 'emergency' 25 percent tariff on Colombian goods" as well as a travel ban and visa sanctions on Colombian government officials, our Adam Kredo reports. He called Petro a "socialist" who "is already very unpopular amongst his people." Petro got the message.
Just 47 minutes after Trump announced the sanctions, Petro changed his mind, announcing that he offered his presidential plane to pick up the deportees. That was fast.
Petro's decision didn't stop Axios and Ana Navarro from lamenting that the new tariffs would raise coffee and flower prices. "Most of the flowers imported into the US, come from Colombia. Happy Valentine's Day, America," Navarro tweeted more than an hour after Petro announced he'd send his plane.
Hours before that dramatic ordeal unfolded, on Saturday night, Trump declared "that he wants to resettle residents of the Gaza Strip in Arab countries," the Free Beacon's Andrew Tobin reports from Jerusalem, "shaking up Middle East diplomacy in signature style."
Trump told reporters during a gaggle on Air Force One that he had asked King Abdullah II of Jordan to "take people" from Gaza and planned to make a similar request of Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Mass emigration from the war-torn strip, he said, could resolve "centuries" of conflict and help Gazans "maybe live in peace for a change."
"The response from Israel was notably muted," writes Tobin, "and even politicians who have advocated Gazan emigration told the Washington Free Beacon that Egypt and Jordan were unlikely to agree to Trump's requests. But some right-wing politicians hailed his proposal as an opportunity to break with decades of U.S. insistence on a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
Talk of facilitating Gazan emigration was once relegated to Israel's far right, Tobin notes, but it "went mainstream after Oct. 7, 2023, when several thousand Hamas terrorists and ordinary Palestinians carried out a massacre and mass abduction in southern Israel, starting in the strip." After the attack, Bibi Netanyahu said he was "working on" finding "countries that are willing to absorb Gazans." Israeli officials, under international criticism, went on to distance themselves from the statement. Trump, for his part, has never worried much about that criticism.
The Biden administration did things differently, opting for the carrot rather than the stick in its approach to foreign affairs. Even after old Joe shuffled out of public life, documents from his time in the White House are providing a more complete picture of his administration's feeble foreign policy.
Last July, Biden "quietly awarded $15 million in taxpayer funds to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to help distribute 'oral contraceptives and condoms,'" according to a non-public congressional funding notice reviewed by our Adam Kredo. The notice bemoaned that the Taliban generally forbids "young women and girls" from going to school or working. It also stated that distributing the contraceptives and condoms would require "some coordination" with the Taliban given the terror group's grip on the Afghan people.
"It was the Biden administration's chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan three years prior," writes Kredo, "that led to those restrictions" and that grip. "The Taliban took over Kabul even before the final U.S. military planes left the city, and they quickly banned girls from school beyond sixth grade, making Afghanistan the only country in the world with such restrictions."
U.S. law forbids taxpayer funds from going to the Taliban, a specially designated global terrorist organization. The USAID funding notice referenced that ban by stating that the agency's efforts in Afghanistan would "require some level of coordination with local, provincial, and national authorities but without directly benefiting them."
"Although some coordination will be necessary for programmatic purposes, USAID and its partners are clear that there will be no direct assistance to the Taliban," the notice states. "Due diligence will continue to be exercised to ensure compliance with OFAC sanctions and statutory restrictions on assistance to the Taliban and that programs have robust safeguards in place to prevent Taliban interference or diversion."
Last week, the Trump administration issued a broad freeze on foreign aid to determine whether the money is "aligned with President Trump's foreign policy agenda." The Afghan condom money may not be a great fit.
Away from the Beacon:
- CBS News's Margaret Brennan told J.D. Vance it "wasn't clear" whether an Afghan refugee who plotted an Election Day terror attack in Oklahoma "was radicalized when he got here or while he was living here." Vance's response: "I don't really care, Margaret, I don't want that person in my country, and I think most Americans agree with me."
- A reporter aboard Air Force One asked Trump why he released a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel that Biden blocked. "They paid for them. … We released them today to Israel," Trump said. "Why did you do that, sir?" the reporter asked again. "Because they bought them," Trump said.
- The CIA now believes that COVID most likely came from a lab in Wuhan. Good enough for government work!