President Trump was operating within his constitutional powers as commander in chief when he ordered the U.S. military to destroy a vessel in the Caribbean, administration officials said, describing the drugs it was allegedly smuggling as an imminent national security threat.
But that claim was sharply disputed by legal experts and some lawmakers, who said that Trump exceeded his legal authority by using lethal military force against a target that posed no direct danger to the U.S. and doing so without congressional authorization.
The disagreement since Trump announced the deadly attack Tuesday underscored how much of a departure it represents from decades of U.S. counternarcotics operations—and raised questions about whether drug smugglers can be treated as legitimate military targets.
“Every boatload of any form of drug that poisons the American people is an imminent threat. And at the DOD, our job is to defeat imminent threats,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters Thursday during a visit to an Army base in Georgia. “A drug cartel is no different than al Qaeda, and they will be treated as such.”
Trump administration officials said Tuesday’s strike, which killed 11 people on the boat, was just the opening salvo in an expanded campaign to dismantle the drug cartels they say pose a major threat to Americans.
But in importing tactics from the post-9/11 war against terrorist groups to use against drug cartels, some former officials said, Trump is trampling on longstanding limits on presidential use of force and asserting legal authorities that don’t exist.
The casualties “weren’t engaged in anything like a direct attack on the United States” and weren’t afforded a trial to determine their guilt, said Frank Kendall, who served as the secretary of the Air Force during the Biden administration and holds a law degree. “Frankly, I can’t see how this can be considered anything other than a nonjudicial killing outside the boundaries of domestic and international law.”
Unlike the interdictions which are usually conducted by the U.S. Coast Guard, the strike was carried out without warning shots, and no effort was made to detain the ship, apprehend its crew, or confirm the drugs on board. “Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders they blew it up,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in Mexico City on Wednesday.
Trump said U.S. forces “positively identified” the crew before the attack as members of Venezuelan crime syndicate Tren de Aragua, calling them “narcoterrorists.” Tren de Aragua is among the Latin American cartels and gangs that Trump has designated as foreign terrorist organizations since February.
The White House has provided no further information on the operation against the boat or detailed the legal arguments that it claims support it. Nor have officials disclosed where the strike took place, the identities of the casualties or the weapons used.
Some Trump administration officials suggest that by designating the drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, the Pentagon has the leeway to treat the groups as it would foreign terrorists. As commander in chief, Trump has the power to order military action against imminent threats without congressional authorization, they said.
The strike “was taken in defense of vital U.S. national interests and in the collective self-defense of other nations,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said, adding that the strike occurred in international waters and “was fully consistent with the law of armed conflict.”
But Geoffrey Corn, a retired lieutenant colonel who was the Army’s senior adviser on the law of war, said: “I don’t think there is any way to legitimately characterize a drug ship heading from Venezuela, arguably to Trinidad, as an actual or imminent armed attack against the United States, justifying this military response.”
Corn, a law professor at Texas Tech University, noted that critics have condemned U.S. drone strikes since 2001 against militants in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries as extrajudicial killings, but those strikes were legitimate, he said, because the U.S. was engaged in an armed conflict under the laws of war against al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is now at the International Crisis Group, said that designation of drug cartels as terrorist groups doesn’t authorize the use of military force against them. Rather it enables the U.S. to levy sanctions and pursue criminal prosecutions against individuals who support the groups.
Nor can military action be justified under the law Congress passed authorizing the use of force against al Qaeda and related terrorist groups following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, experts said.
For the military to use force, “there needs to be a legitimate claim of self-defense in international waters, an action that is necessary and proportional in response to an armed attack or imminent armed attack,” said Juan Gonzalez, who served as the National Security Council’s senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs during the Biden administration. “That clearly didn’t happen.”
The attack was the U.S. military’s first publicly acknowledged airstrike in Central or South America since the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989. The White House released a grainy black-and-white video that showed the destruction of a small boat, which it celebrated as a blunt warning for drug traffickers throughout the region.
Trump administration officials have offered conflicting accounts of the episode. On Tuesday, Rubio said the drugs the vessel was carrying “were probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean” and could “contribute to the instability these countries are facing,” differing from Trump’s statement that the vessel was “heading to the United States.” On Wednesday, Rubio suggested that the shipment was “eventually” headed to the U.S.
No state in the region has publicly appealed for the U.S. to take military action against the cartels as an act of collective self-defense, Corn said.
On Thursday, two Venezuelan F-16 jet fighters flew near one of the U.S. Navy warships that have been positioned near the county. The Pentagon criticized the apparent show of force as a “highly provocative move” and warned Venezuela not to interfere with its “counter narco-terror operations.”
In the past, some U.S. counternarcotics strikes have ended in tragedy. In 2001, Peruvian and U.S. counterdrug agents mistook a small plane carrying American missionaries over the Peruvian Amazon as belonging to drug traffickers. The Peruvian Air Force shot down the plane, killing a 35-year-old woman and her infant daughter.
The U.S. has limited intelligence on small drug boats leaving Venezuela, from which the Drug Enforcement Administration was expelled in 2005 under then-President Hugo Chávez, said Mike Vigil, a former DEA director of international operations.
“The United States doesn’t really have the capability to develop good intelligence about these embarkations,” he said. “You don’t just send a missile and destroy a boat. It is the equivalent of a police officer walking up to a drug trafficker on the street and shooting him.”
In Quito, Ecuador, on Thursday, Rubio announced the designation of two more criminal groups—the Ecuadorean Los Choneros and Los Lobos—as foreign terrorist organizations. He said U.S. partners in the region would participate in operations to use lethal force against drug cartels.
A senior Mexican naval officer with decades of service and experience boarding drug vessels said actions like the one taken Tuesday by the U.S. would never be allowed by its Mexican counterpart, which has been trained in interdiction procedures by the U.S. Coast Guard.
“There is never a direct attack unless you are attacked,” he said. “As commander of the ship, I would get into serious trouble. I could be accused of murder.”
