Why Are We Bombing Drug Boats?

By Jen Kirby | September 22, 2025 | 1:16pm

Screenshot via Donald Trump

Trump Administration The War on Drugs

The United States apparently bombed a third suspected drug boat in the Caribbean Sea. “We knocked off, actually, three boats – not two – but you saw two,” Trump told reporters last week.

That the United States may have committed a third, almost certainly illegal lethal strike on a suspected drug boat without bothering to provide much supporting evidence or justification underscores just how brazen and expansive the administration’s so-called war on drugs has been. The United States has historically exerted its dominance in the Western hemisphere, but the Trump administration is explicit about its interventionism.

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“While U.S. militarization in Latin America is nothing new, Trump brings an added element of unpredictability, particularly regarding how far such operations might go,” said Clarissa Nascimento Forner, a professor of international relations at the Universidade de Estado do Rio de Janeiro in a message.

To recap: On September 2, the United States said it carried out a strike on a drug smuggling speed boat that killed 11 “Tren de Aragua terrorists,” referring to the Venezuelan gang that the Trump administration has deemed a foreign terrorist organization. The Trump administration justified this strike because illicit drugs kill tens of thousands of Americans each year, and “to address the continuing threat to United States persons and interests emanating from their territories, we have now reached a critical point where we must meet this threat to our citizens and our most vital national interests with United States military force in self- defense,” Trump wrote in a letter to Congress after the attack.

The administration provided a grainy video of the boat and its destruction, which did nothing to back up its allegation that these were Venezuelan smugglers speeding toward America to imminently drop off fentanyl. Secretary of State Marco Rubio originally told reporters that the boat was likely bound for Trinidad and Tobago, or “some other country in the Caribbean,” only to change the destination after Trump claimed it was headed toward the United States. Yet U.S. officials told the New York Times that the boat appeared to have turned around before the strike because it spotted the military aircraft overhead. The Intercept also reported that the U.S. may have struck multiple times because the people on board survived the initial attack.

Last week, the Trump administration claimed to have destroyed another boat with three people aboard. Again, the administration offered no evidence other than a video and its word. “All you have to do is look at the cargo that was, like — it spattered all over the ocean, big bags of cocaine and fentanyl all over the place, and it was — plus, we have recorded evidence that they were leaving,” Trump said. Then, he said offhandedly to reporters last Tuesday that the U.S. blew up a third boat, but didn’t offer any details until Friday, when Trump posted on Truth Social that he had ordered “a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization conducting narcotrafficking,” which suggests the administration is doing whatever the heck it wants without even bothering to come up with fake pretenses. (Splinter reached out to both the White House National Security Council and U.S. Southern Command, although it’s safe to assume they are not going to be responding.)

There are two enormous issues here. The first, is the very, very likely illegality – and the fact that the administration not only doesn’t seem to care, they’re openly and gleefully flaunting it. The second is a broader ratcheting up of interventionism and military pressure in the Western hemisphere, without a clear objective of what it seeks to accomplish with both its drug crackdown and its broader national security goals. Most recent data shows the Pacific as a much busier route for drugs coming into the United States, so it’s not clear what taking out tiny boats in the Caribbean accomplishes, other than a cruel whack-a-mole that serves a lust that this administration has to look tough. (Unless you’re Russia or China, where the U.S. attitude is basically “do whatevs.”)

Right now, the Trump administration looks as if it’s combining the most egregious elements of the global war on terror with the worst elements of the war on drugs. That combination would be troubling enough, but it is carried out by an administration that has been untransparent and emboldened in its show of force at home and abroad. What could possibly go wrong?

This Seems to Be Very Illegal, Even by the Sometimes Malleable U.S. Standards

Many, many legal scholars have said this strike looks illegal under both domestic and international law. Unless the information available radically changes, it’s not really a close call. While the Trump administration has designated drug cartels like Tren de Aragua as foreign terrorist organizations (the Biden administration, for example, designated them as a transnational criminal organization), these were not armed combatants engaged in a war with the United States, which means that it looks very likely that the U.S. military just committed some murders.

Brian Finucane, a senior adviser with the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group wrote in Just Security that, as a former government lawyer and critic of U.S. policies during the global war on terror, he was “all too familiar with the abuses and overreaches of those wars – which in some cases bled into outright criminality.” He wrote, emphasis his:

“But the Trump administration’s lethal strike in the Caribbean is categorically distinct from these prior controversies. With its fatal attack on a vessel in the Caribbean and vows to bomb more boats, the Trump administration is not so much seeking to stretch the legal underpinning of the war on terror to a new battlefield (which has been done all too frequently by past administrations). Instead, the administration is effectively asserting the prerogative to kill outside the law entirely.”

Other legal scholars have also pointed out how it’s one thing to have Trump and his team give an order to blow up suspected drug dealers, it is another thing entirely for the military to carry out such an order – and now, apparently, three times.

“It’s difficult to understand how it came to pass that the non-appointed military officials and enlistees involved in the operation assented to such an indefensible breach of the fundamental norm against targeting civilians,” wrote Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman in Just Security. Lederman said he examined the possible justifications, “including the one that is the most likely explanation—namely, that the military accepted an implausible presidential determination that the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with Tren de Aragua, and that therefore the U.S. military can summarily kill alleged members of that criminal gang based solely upon their membership in that organization.”

Even John Yoo – he of the “enhanced interrogation memo” under Bush II – told Politico: “We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every crime.”

When you’ve lost the torture memo guy, well.

Yet the Trump administration does not really seem to care that it likely broke U.S. domestic and international law. Vice President J.D. Vance was, I guess, joking about murder at an event last week, telling an audience: “I wouldn’t go fishing right now.”

Congressional Democrats and Rand Paul have pushed back against the administration’s strikes, and they have also complained that they are being stonewalled. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Thursday, Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) said the administration had still not answered the Senate’s questions about the military strike. “There might be answers to these questions that would satisfy us, but I can tell you—when the questions are not answered, we end up with some real suspicion about why they’ve not being answered,” Kaine said.

The House did include a bipartisan amendment in its version of the massive $900 defense bill to repeal the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force used in Iraq, which has been used by multiple administrations to justify military action. That is a long-overdue step, but it also matters very little if the administration doesn’t feel it needs to follow the law. Then again, maybe the law will change: there is also reportedly a draft bill circulating that would give the president authorities to kill people he deems “narco-terrorists” or attack countries that harbor or aid them.

Of course, operations to stop the flow of drugs into the U.S. is something the administration should be doing, although the how matters. Drug smugglers may not be great guys, but they are not terrorists in key ways. Specifically, they are motivated by profit and want to make money; they generally don’t want to take out governments, though they’re happy to corrupt and subvert them. Given their pervasiveness, people involved with cartels at different levels are also absorbed into the regular population, something true for actual terrorists like the Islamic State, which meant civilians became collateral in U.S. efforts to take them out. Imagine that on an even more chilling scale.

And all of this is happening against the backdrop of increased pressure and military presence in the region. That makes it both hard to see what the end-goal of the Trump administration is here, but also raises the alarm on what might be possible.

“The fact that this is a very expensive operation that has lasted for, what, three weeks now, and Trump said [Tuesday] that there was a third strike that we don’t know where it happened, that we don’t have any information about that,” Laura Cristina Dib, Venezuela Program Director at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), told Splinter. “Those are elements that should be of concern to the general public about what the administration is doing in the region.”

What Is the U.S. Doing?

In August, Trump signed a secret memo ordering the military to target drug cartels, typically the purview of law enforcement. In addition to Tren de Aragua, the administration has designated other cartels and criminal gangs as foreign terrorist organizations. The United States has designated “military zones“ at the southern border. The U.S. has advanced F-35 stealth fighter jets stationed in Puerto Rico. The Drug Enforcement Administration apparently lobbied for military strikes in Mexico. U.S. Naval warships are in the waters near Venezuela, prompting real questions as to whether Donald “No New Wars“ Trump is going to invade, or carry out strikes against drug cartels within Venezuela, something reportedly discussed by the administration.

Add Trump’s past threats about seizing the Panama Canal and the heavy tariffs it has levied against Brazil because the country actually prosecuted its former president for attempting a coup. White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt responded insanely to a question about the administration’s response to the conviction of former president and MAGA ally Jair Bolsonaro last week by saying, “the president is unafraid to use the economic might, the military might, of the United States to protect free speech around the world.”

It seems very unlikely that the U.S. would invade Brazil over Bolsonaro – or even Venezuela. But it also doesn’t feel possible to totally rule it out, with U.S. warships deployed in the waters off Venezuela. That is pretty terrifying, and maybe the point. The Trump administration seems to want to be purposefully unpredictable, further coercing a region that has really gotten it quite a lot from the U.S. over the past decades.

Venezuela and its authoritarian leader, Nicolas Maduro, has long been the target for Republicans, and the first Trump administration also saber-rattled about using military force against Maduro. The country is currently under an aggressive U.S. sanctions regime, alongside the corruption and ongoing antidemocratic crackdowns by the Maduro government, which has exacerbated the economic and humanitarian crisis there. That has forced millions of people to flee in recent years, including to the United States, where they are now under threat from Trump’s expansive immigration crackdown.

The Trump administration has a reward of $50 million out for Nicolas Maduro, who they claim is the head of the Cartel de los Soles, which the administration says is a specially designated terrorist organization trafficking drugs into the United States. Senior Venezuelan government officials are absolutely involved in the illicit drug trade, but experts say Cartel del los Soles is a moniker for that informal network, it’s not an actual cartel or entity. Venezuela’s instability and corruption have made it a hub for drug trafficking, but as the New York Times reported, Venezuela does not even rank first in the region in cocaine smuggling, and doesn’t have much involvement with fentanyl, which is mostly produced in Mexico.

As Dib pointed, that is also part of the challenge of the Trump administration’s rhetoric; there is a little bit of truth attached to what they say – Maduro’s regime has been tied to illicit economies – but then it is weaponized and distorted. “Using The Alien Enemies Act and saying there is an invasion from Venezuela. That’s a deep distortion from what Tren de Aragua is actually able to do,” Dib said. “But that’s not to say that the gang doesn’t exist.”

Of course, if an administration is looking for a pretext to attack drug cartels in Venezuela, the details don’t matter – pretty sure we’ve all seen this movie before. That is not to suggest a U.S. attack on Venezuela is a likely outcome, but the rhetoric combined with actual military muscle – and use of force – in the region should give the U.S. public pause about what America is trying to accomplish – and whether this is actually in U.S. interests.

A Politico report suggests that the Trump administration is making it so, and that its national security agenda will prioritize the homeland and the region over other threats, including China. The U.S. military budget is about to hit $1 trillion – a startling sum, but maybe more so when you consider the Trump administration is sending $100 million fighter jets to sit in Puerto Rico and deploying a $200 million landscaping crew to Washington, D.C. And while illicit drug trafficking – and the demand that drives it – are real and significant challenges, the blurring of the lines between drug trade and terrorism risks expanding the parameters of where force is acceptable, and entrenching an even more unaccountable American government.

”Regardless of the political party in power, U.S. foreign policy to the region has been one that seeks to maintain its influence and material profit,” said Camila Vidal, a professor at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC). “However, this administration stands out because it does not hide its interventionist and aggressive nature in conducting its policy. In this sense, it is quite transparent about U.S. objectives in the region. It publicly acknowledges its interventionist and authoritarian stance.”