In early December 2025, the Trump administration published its new National Security Strategy, described by its own authors as a corollary to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. The text demands access to strategic locations across the hemisphere and cooperation from regional governments, while renouncing, at least on paper, any contest with China and Russia over other parts of the world. Behind the diplomatic language lies a deeper decision, the United States is reclaiming direct control of Latin America as its exclusive sphere of influence.
The instrument of choice for that reclamation is not the marines, it is friendly governments, pardoned or tolerated as long as they serve the purpose, and migration agencies turned into a foreign policy weapon. Coral, Hernández in Honduras and the suspicions surrounding the Ecuadorian president are three expressions of the same corollary.
The agency that changed its nature
The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, ICE, was created in March 2003 within the government reorganisation that followed the September 11th attacks. It inherited functions from the former Immigration and Naturalisation Service and the Customs Service, folded into the newly created Department of Homeland Security. Its investigative arm, HSI, ended up being the unit behind Coral’s arrest, even though its original mandate targeted transnational organised crime, not the political surveillance of activists. The founding rhetoric spoke of counterterrorism, but the agency inherited from the start the racial tensions already running through the country’s immigration policy. Twenty-two years on, that inheritance has become its defining trait.
Trump’s arrival for a second term accelerated that trait into doctrine. In the first fifty days of his administration, 32,809 arrests took place, a figure comparable to the entire previous fiscal year, and by November 2025 there were 65,735 people in the agency’s custody, 67% more than at the start of that same year. The administration has not hidden the objective, one need only hear its own officials explain on television that an accent or a tattoo is already grounds enough for suspicion.
The ruling that legitimises suspicion
The legal turning point came on 8 September 2025, when the United States Supreme Court lifted, by six votes to three, a judicial order that had barred ICE agents from detaining people based on their ethnic appearance, the language they speak or the kind of work they do. The case is known as Noem v Vásquez Perdomo, and its scope is for now limited to seven Californian counties, although the psychological effect has been felt across the whole country. Conservative judge Brett Kavanaugh wrote that ethnicity alone is not enough to justify a detention, but that it remains a relevant factor when combined with other indicators. In practice, that means speaking Spanish at a bus stop or working in construction can become evidence.
According to the ruling, ICE agents based their stops on four factors, apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or accented English, presence in places such as bus stops or car washes, and employment in sectors such as construction or agriculture.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissent that the ruling allows the detention of anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish and holds a low wage job, with no further evidence required. The human cost of that authorisation already has its own figure.
According to an ABC News analysis based on official ICE data and reports sent to Congress, around fifty migrants have died in the agency’s custody since January 2025, the highest figure recorded in twenty years.
Honduras and Ecuador, the same script
What happens to migrants inside the United States has its mirror in what Washington does beyond its borders. In early December 2025, Trump pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, sentenced the previous year to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking, and an appeals court formally overturned the conviction the following 8 April. The man a federal jury had found guilty of facilitating large scale cocaine shipments walked free by presidential decree, while dozens of people keep dying in the Caribbean under American military strikes justified, precisely, as anti-drug operations. The asymmetry needs no comment.
Five months after regaining his freedom, Hernández found himself at the centre of a fresh scandal. Recordings leaked between January and April 2026, published by Spanish outlet Diario Red and by the Hondurasgate portal, show him discussing with current Honduran president Nasry Asfura the building of a digital disinformation cell aimed at striking the governments of Gustavo Petro in Colombia and Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico. In one of those recordings, Hernández mentions having spoken to Argentine president Javier Milei, who allegedly contributed 350,000 dollars to the project. Milei has not commented, technical analysis concluded the voices were genuine and unedited, and nobody has independently confirmed the money actually changed hands. What is confirmed is the intention, narrated by Hernández himself, of building from the United States a media apparatus against regional governments that do not share Washington’s line.
The pattern repeats further south. In February 2026, drug trafficker Wilmer Chavarría, alias Pipo, leader of the Los Lobos gang, told prosecutors in Zaragoza that someone close to Ecuador’s interior minister had told him that President Daniel Noboa ordered the 2023 assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio. It is a third hand accusation, made by a detained crime boss with obvious motives for casting doubt on those pursuing him, and the Ecuadorian government called it absurd, as did Villavicencio’s own daughters. None of this proves anything, but it illustrates the same pattern, presidents aligned with Washington governing under unresolved suspicions of serious crimes, while their allies in the north guarantee them political cover.
The case of Beto Coral
Within that map of operators and beneficiaries sits the detention of Franklin Humberto Coral Garrido, known online as Beto Coral, which took place on Tuesday 16 June 2026 in Phoenix, Arizona. Coral is the son of police captain Humberto Coral, a member of the Search Bloc that hunted Pablo Escobar and who was murdered five months later, in circumstances his son never stopped investigating. Captain Coral had been an anti-narcotics commander at El Dorado airport and joined the Search Bloc with a track record of investigating corrupt officers within the institution itself, which according to his widow bred resentment among his colleagues before the murder. That investigation into his father’s killing, and the threats it generated, led Beto to seek asylum in the United States in March 2016, barely three months after entering the country on a six month tourist visa. The work permit issued from that application allowed him to drive taxis, obtain driving licences in Florida and Arizona, and support his family for eleven years.
Days earlier, Coral had been in Miami filing a lawsuit against De la Espriella for allegedly recording him without authorisation, and publicly protesting him at early voting at the Watsco Center. De la Espriella supporters immediately demanded his expulsion on social media, tagging Under Secretary of State Christopher Landau, nicknamed by the Colombian right the visa stripper for his role in cancelling the visas of officials in Petro’s government. Forty eight hours later, the arrest took place.
HSI agents intercepted him as he walked home with his minor son after grocery shopping, allowed him in to fetch his asylum documents, and took him into detention. According to what Coral told journalist Daniel Coronell, one agent told him the order came directly from the State Department, and a friend of his claims to have seen a memo signed by Secretary Marco Rubio inside the vehicle. No authority has confirmed that detail. The official response Homeland Security sent to several Colombian journalists is far duller than any theory of political persecution, there is no criminal charge, the statement says, Coral simply remained in the country eleven years longer than his visa allowed, an administrative infraction the government itself acknowledges is not a crime. That same response is what best describes the mechanism, there is no need to persecute anyone for their ideas when an expired visa does the job just as well.
The transfer to El Paso
On Thursday 18 June, two days after the arrest, the family confirmed Coral had been moved from Florence prison to an ICE processing centre in El Paso, Texas, more than eight hours away by road. According to what he told his mother and his son’s mother by phone, he was put on a truck without being told where he was being taken, travelled shackled at the hands and feet, and on arrival was pressured to sign his voluntary deportation. Coral said he was struck and submerged in cold water, and that he had still not been read his Miranda rights. No American authority has confirmed or denied these claims, which come solely from the account the family gave journalist Daniel Coronell.
The family issued a statement demanding his release, insisting Coral entered legally, applied for asylum within the legal timeframe, and held a work permit valid until 2028 at the time of his arrest, a detail only the family has specified so far. They summed up the case in one line, “they want to silence Beto, but ideas cannot be locked up”. ICE notified hours later that the deportation hearing had been set for 30 June at half past eight in the morning.
The complaints nobody read in Bogotá
While Coral’s case dominated Colombian newscasts, eleven Democratic members of the United States Congress, including Jesús García, Greg Casar, Rashida Tlaib and Pramila Jayapal, sent a letter to Marco Rubio, to Todd Blanche and to Scott Bessent. The document asks them to investigate candidate Abelardo de la Espriella over alleged links to the AUC, his closeness to businessman Álex Saab, accused of acting as a front man for Nicolás Maduro, and at least fourteen Florida companies whose source of funds the congressmen consider unclear. The letter also accuses the Trump administration of openly interfering in the Colombian election in De la Espriella’s favour, and asks it to stop doing so.
In Colombia, senator Iván Cepeda went further. On 11 June he filed a criminal complaint, and another before the International Criminal Court, arguing that De la Espriella was not merely a financier or accomplice of the AUC, as had been said until now, but may have belonged directly to the organisation through the Peace Initiatives Foundation, created while the paramilitary group had not yet demobilised. De la Espriella responded by calling the complaint a desperate move and accusing Cepeda of links to the FARC. Neither accusation has been proven in court, but both arrive ten days before the run-off. No Colombian television channel devoted to these complaints the time it gave to the celebration of an influencer detained in Arizona.
Those who celebrate
Hours before Coral’s detention became known, De la Espriella posted a message on social media that his followers read as an announcement, there will be good news for Colombia and for patriotic Colombians abroad, he wrote, alongside an image once again referencing Landau. There is no proof the message was coordinated with the arrest, and it is worth not claiming what cannot be proven, but the timing was enough for several sectors of Colombian politics to read it as confirmation.
The one who spoke without any ambiguity was José Obdulio Gaviria, Pablo Escobar’s cousin and a former senator close to Álvaro Uribe, who called the detention a masterpiece of justice and described Coral as one of his fiercest and most vocal opponents. President Petro responded by reminding Gaviria of his time in power during the years the mass graves of La Escombrera, in Medellín’s Comuna 13, came to light. The exchange neatly sums up the cast of this story, the man whose surname recalls the cartel that had Coral’s father killed publicly celebrates the son ending up detained in an Arizona prison.
There is something here that deserves naming plainly. De la Espriella holds American citizenship and went through that country’s own migration mechanisms himself. That a presidential hopeful celebrates, or at least does not condemn, the use of an agency that discriminates against his own compatriots abroad while courting their votes, is no minor detail of the character. It is proof that the expatriate vote matters less to him than loyalty to whoever can grant him power.
What decides his fate
The pattern is not exclusively American. On the very 17 June that Coral’s family was reporting mistreatment, the European Parliament approved by 418 votes the Return Regulation, which allows return centres for migrants outside the Union. Germany, Austria, Denmark, Greece and the Netherlands are already negotiating where to set them up. Migration as a mechanism of control, not as a humanitarian problem, is now the shared language of governments that call themselves democracies, on both sides of the Atlantic.
The real options left to Coral are less simple than the DHS statement suggests. Immigration lawyer Maritza Choicer explained, during Coronell’s broadcast, that legal classification matters more than the political narrative, an arriving alien has no right to bail, but Coral entered ten years ago and never left, which in principle excludes him from that category and opens the door to a bond hearing.
There is a fact rarely mentioned, immigration judges do not belong to the judicial branch but to the Department of Justice, they are administrative officials with monthly deportation targets who can be dismissed if they fail to meet them. Choicer summed it up bluntly, they are not independent judges, they are subordinates of the executive branch. If bail is denied, the next step is to appeal before the Board of Immigration Appeals or go straight to a federal court, where more than ten thousand detainees have already won favourable rulings this year.
That is where, not in speeches from Petro or Bernie Moreno, it will be decided whether Beto Coral returns to Phoenix or to Bogotá. On 30 June, in a hearing lasting minutes in El Paso, we will know more. None of these forums require proof of anything about his political views, and that is, perhaps, the most uncomfortable lesson of this whole episode, control mechanisms no longer need to justify themselves in political terms to produce exactly the effects politics is after…
G.S. & R.C.
Fuentes
- Influenciador Beto Coral fue capturado por agentes de inmigración en EE.UU.
- Quién es Beto Coral, el activista colombiano detenido por ICE en Arizona
- Quién es Beto Coral, el activista e influencer cercano al petrismo
- ¿Quién es Beto Coral? Lo que se sabe del arresto del activista colombiano en EE. UU.
- El fallo de la Corte Suprema que otorga al ICE la potestad de arrestar
- Luz verde al perfil racial de ICE
- Indulto a Juan Orlando Hernández, implicaciones para la política exterior de Estados Unidos
- Hondurasgate, los audios que salpican a Milei
- Narco ‘Pipo’ acusa a presidente de Ecuador de ordenar el asesinato de Fernando Villavicencio
- Ecuador tilda de “disparate” acusar a Noboa de asesinato de Villavicencio
- Excandidata al Senado vincula la “tigreseñal” de De la Espriella con la detención de Beto Coral
- Gustavo Petro arremete contra política migratoria tras captura de Beto Coral
- Elecciones en Colombia, Iván Cepeda denuncia a Abelardo de la Espriella por vínculos paramilitares
- La Eurocámara aprueba el reglamento que permite centros de migrantes en el extranjero
- La «Doctrina Monroe 2.0» de Trump. Dossier
- Detención de Beto Coral, ¿qué es y qué hace el HSI?
- El Reporte Coronell, transmisión en vivo del 17 de junio de 2026
- Beto Coral dice que ha sido maltratado. Se encuentra recluido en Texas, El Reporte Coronell
