President Trump on Wednesday sought to defend recent strikes by the U.S. military on boats suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean, which some critics, lawmakers and legal experts say is a violation of international law.
“When they’re loaded up with drugs, they’re fair game,” Trump told reporters at a news conference in the Oval Office alongside FBI Director Kash Patel. “Every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives. … If you lose three people and save 25,000 people — these are people that are killing our population.”
Asked why his administration had stopped tasking the U.S. Coast Guard with intercepting suspected drug vessels, Trump argued that “it never worked when you did it in a very politically correct manner.”
“They have faster boats,” the president said. “Seriously, they’re world class speedboats. But they’re not faster than missiles.”
Trump went on to claim that his administration has “almost totally stopped” drugs coming into the U.S. “by sea” — and said that it would soon expand its efforts to “land.”
“We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” Trump said.
Trump’s comments came a day after he announced in a post on Truth Social that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had “ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel” that he said was affiliated with a designated terrorist organization and was transporting drugs in international waters “just off the Coast of Venezuela.”
“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking narcotics, was associated with illicit narcoterrorist networks, and was transiting along a known” route used by drug smugglers, Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Six male narcoterrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike. No U.S. Forces were harmed. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!!!!”
The post included a 33-second aerial surveillance video showing the apparent strike. The footage was labeled “unclassified.”
There have been at least five known strikes on boats in the Caribbean carried out by the U.S. military since early September, killing at least 27 people, according to the Trump administration.
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Sept. 2: The U.S. attacks an alleged Venezuelan drug boat for the first time, killing 11.
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Sept. 15: Trump says the U.S. military has carried out a second strike on an alleged Venezuelan drug cartel vessel heading to the U.S., killing three. He posts a video of the attack on social media.
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Sept. 19: The U.S. military strikes a vessel “trafficking illicit narcotics” and “transiting along a known narcotrafficking passage,” Trump announces on X, killing “3 male narcoterrorists.”
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Oct. 3: The U.S. military destroys what it deemed to be a “narco-trafficking vessel” in international waters just off Venezuela’s coast, killing all four people on board, according to Hegseth.
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Oct. 14: Trump announces the latest U.S. strike in the Caribbean, claiming it killed six “male narcoterrorists.”
Donald Trump/Truth Social
The Trump administration has justified the strikes as necessary in order to stem the flow of illicit drugs into the United States. But the use of lethal military force against suspected drug smuggling boats is unprecedented. In previous administrations, the Coast Guard would be used to intercept boats and arrest drug smugglers — not kill them.
Trump’s legal rationale, which the administration has articulated in a series of recent letters to Congress, is that the drug cartels are “nonstate armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States” — forcing the U.S. to fight back in a formal “armed conflict.”
According to the administration, simply declaring an armed conflict gives Trump the power to treat any suspected smugglers as “unlawful combatants” under international law: enemy fighters who can be killed without legal review, even when they pose no threat.
In response, experts have argued that drug cartels are not engaged in “hostilities” against the U.S. — the legal standard for armed conflict — because selling a dangerous product is different from conducting an armed attack.
It is illegal for the military to deliberately target civilians who aren’t directly participating in hostilities — even suspected criminals.
“This is not stretching the envelope,” Geoffrey Corn, a retired judge advocate general lawyer who was formerly the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues, recently told the New York Times. “This is shredding it. This is tearing it apart.”
Critics fear the strikes could pave the way for wider conflict in the region. On Wednesday, the Times reported that the Trump administration has secretly authorized the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela, stepping up its push to oust Nicolás Maduro, the country’s authoritarian leader — a move that comes while “the U.S. military is planning its own possible escalation” and “drawing up options for President Trump to consider, including strikes inside Venezuela,” according to the Times.
“We’re not going to let our country be ruined because other countries want to drop their worst [here],” Trump said Wednesday when asked about his decision to authorize covert CIA action in Venezuela. “And we’re not going to take it.
Meanwhile, CNN reported Wednesday that the U.S. military’s Sept. 19 attack in the Caribbean actually “targeted Colombian nationals on a boat that had left from Colombia,” citing two people briefed by the Pentagon about the strikes.
“It is possible that they were Colombians,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro wrote on X shortly after the strike. “This means that officials from the U.S. and the Dominican Republic would be guilty of the murder of Colombian citizens.”
Criticism in Congress
The use of military force against alleged drug vessels has drawn sharp criticism from some lawmakers on Capitol Hill, including several Republicans.
GOP Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joined Democrats in voting to advance a bill aimed at blocking Trump’s use of the U.S. military against “any organization engaged in the promotion, trafficking, and distribution of illegal drugs and other related activities, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war.”
The motion failed to pass.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg News, Paul argued that the Coast Guard frequently stops boats suspected of carrying drugs only to discover that they are not.
“About 25% of the time, the boat that they board doesn’t have drugs on it. So they have made an error but they don’t kill them,” Paul said on Oct. 7. “We’ve blown up four boats now, and if the percentages hold true, did one of those four boats not have drug dealers on it?”
Paul added: “I don’t think you can have a universal Coast Guard policy of just blowing up boats before they’re interdicted.”
Rep. Jim Himes — a Democrat from Connecticut and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee — said Sunday that beyond the administration’s letters, members of Congress had not been briefed on the strikes.
Himes called them “illegal killings.”
“The notion that the United States — and this is what the administration says is their justification — is involved in an armed conflict with any drug dealers, any Venezuelan drug dealers, is ludicrous,” Himes said on CBS’s Face the Nation. “It wouldn’t stand up in a single court of law.”
