Killing Suspected Drug Smugglers Has Become the New Normal

President Donald Trump was eager about a fresh military operation. “Earlier this morning,” he proclaimed on the afternoon of September 2, 2025, “U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility.” He declared that the attack should “serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America,” adding the emphatic warning: “BEWARE! Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!!!!!!!!!”

That barrage of eleven exclamation points might have seemed excessive. Yet Trump was correct that Americans needed to take notice. His Truth Social post, which featured a 29-second clip showing a Caribbean speedboat blown up by a missile, signaled a radical and alarming transformation in U.S. drug policy.

Traditionally, the Coast Guard aimed to curb smuggling on the sea by stopping suspected traffickers and inspecting their boats. It would seize any contraband found and arrest the crew. The Coast Guard continues to do that. But Trump views that approach as not forceful enough. Under his new framework, U.S. military forces obliterate vessels judged to be transporting cocaine, annihilating both the boats and their crews.

From Trump’s viewpoint, the advantages of this approach are evident. There is no need to confirm that a particular boat is indeed carrying drugs, nor to prove it in court. By treating criminal suspects as “unlawful combatants” in an “armed conflict” with the United States, Trump has managed to sidestep due process and the constraints of the law of armed conflict.

Interdiction “doesn’t work,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained the day after the initial boat strike. “Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up. And it’ll happen again.”

Rubio was right that it would recur. By late August 2026, U.S. forces had employed missiles to destroy boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific on 68 occasions under Trump’s orders, effectively killing 227 individuals in cold blood without any pretense of due process.

With a few notable exceptions, we do not know who those individuals were, or what evidence the government might have had to link them to drug trafficking. Yet Trump maintains that they were all “narcoterrorists” who deserved their fate, even though they would not have faced the death penalty under U.S. law and, judging by the fate of drug smugglers arrested around that era, would likely not have faced prosecution at all if captured by the Coast Guard.

All of this, Trump claims, is lawful and astonishingly effective. Although there is ample reason to doubt both assertions, the president has remained unshaken by objections from legal scholars, drug-policy experts, and members of Congress.

A year after Trump launched his bloodthirsty anti-drug campaign, the summary executions of alleged drug smugglers had become routine. By turning the war on drugs into a literal battlefield, Trump has bypassed legal norms, undermined fundamental justice, and corrupted the mission of the U.S. military, erasing the line between combatants and civilians.

Trump Isn’t Sure Who He Is Killing

In his narration, the inaugural boat strike, which occurred in international waters off the northeastern shore of Venezuela, killed “11 terrorists.” How did he determine they were terrorists? He claimed all eleven men had been “positively identified” as members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, “a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization” (FTO) implicated in “mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and [the] Western Hemisphere.”

That account seemed dubious from the outset. Tren de Aragua has been tied to a range of crimes, including drug and weapon trafficking, prostitution, kidnapping, extortion, robbery, and human smuggling. The motive behind these activities appears financial rather than political or religious. Yet terrorism is typically defined as “the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government, with the aim of advancing political, social, or ideological goals.”

Trump was correct that the State Department nonetheless had labeled Tren de Aragua as a “foreign terrorist organization,” aligning with his January 2025 executive order directing the secretary of state to designate that gang and “certain international cartels” as FTOs. By August, the State Department listed nearly 100 FTOs, twenty of which were Latin American groups added since the start of Trump’s second term. In addition to Tren de Aragua, the list included drug-trafficking outfits such as the Ecuadorian group Los Lobos, the transnational MS-13 gang, and the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels.

While the Trump administration has named Tren de Aragua as the target of some boat strikes, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has also referred more broadly to “designated terrorist organizations.” Those designations are controlled by the executive branch, which can broaden the list as it sees fit, though Congress can theoretically block a new listing within seven days.

More to the point, an FTO designation does not grant a license to kill presumed members of a listed group at will. Rather, it means that the Treasury Department can cut off the group’s assets and that the Justice Department can prosecute those who provide it with “material support or resources.”

Nor was it clear how the government had “positively identified” all 11 men aboard the boat as “Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.” The large size of the vessel’s crew, which was notably bigger than crews on other attacked boats, cast doubt on that claim.

As The Intercept‘s Nick Turse noted three days after the attack, an 11-man crew would be “unusually large” for a drug-transport boat. “Why would 11 people be on board a boat carrying drugs?” wondered an unnamed “government source” who had attended a classified briefing in a June 2026 interview with Turse. “It’s a high risk for the cartels. That always stood out.” During a closed briefing on Capitol Hill, Turse reported, a “top military officer” stated that some of the people killed by the U.S. military might have been victims of human trafficking.

That concession contradicted what Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson had said during a December 2, 2025 briefing. Wilson insisted that “every single person we have hit thus far” was “a narcoterrorist,” asserting that “our intelligence has confirmed that, and we stand by it.” Yet according to Rep. Sara Jacobs (D–Calif.), Turse noted that “Pentagon officials who briefed her admitted that the administration does not know the identities of all the individuals who were killed in the strikes.”

Trump himself has joked about the possibility of lethal misfires. “I think anyone who saw that will probably pass,” he said after the initial boat strike. “I don’t even know about fishermen. They might say, ‘I’m not getting on the boat. I’m not taking the risk.'”

Turse highlighted another aspect of the first boat strike that would later provoke congressional concern. Eight days after that operation, he reported that some people on the boat “survived an initial strike” and were “subsequently killed in a follow-up attack.” In late November 2025, The Washington Post confirmed that point and added new details: After a missile ripped the boat apart, killing nine people, “two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.” The Special Operations commander overseeing the operation, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, then “ordered a second strike,” and “the two men were blown apart in the water.”

On the surface, that order looked like a war crime, as did the decision to comply. “Members of the armed forces must refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit law of war violations,” the Defense Department’s law-of-war manual states. “For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.” That category includes “those in distress at sea,” who are regarded as “shipwrecked” when they require aid and care, provided they “refrain from any hostile act.”

During a closed-door congressional briefing on December 4, 2025, Bradley reportedly said the two survivors, clinging to an overturned section of the hull, were legitimate military targets because they might have attempted to salvage and deliver their cargo. That claimed “threat” turned out to be purely speculative.

Military officials “told lawmakers they assumed the hull might be afloat because it still contained packs of cocaine,” The New York Times reported. “They believed the survivors could eventually have managed to float back to Venezuela, enabling them to try again to deliver that cocaine, or that another boat could come to pick it up.” Although “they assumed the survivors could be communicating,” classified video of the incident did not show radios or satellite phones, and a surveillance plane apparently did not spot any nearby vessel.

Bradley’s explanation satisfied Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.), who asserted that the men in the water were “trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for [the] United States back over so they could stay in the fight.” That assessment raises a clear question: What fight?

An Armed Conflict Without Hostilities

Trump’s boat strikes target individuals attempting to supply drugs to Americans who desire them. They are not aimed at people who have attacked the United States, attempted to, or have plans to do so. The violence in these operations is notably one-sided, confined to missiles fired by U.S. forces who face no danger and are not actively preventing an attack on others.

Trump maintains that the violence is nevertheless justified under international law. In his explanation to Congress a month after the initial attack, he argued that the United States is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with “nonstate armed groups” whose actions constitute an armed attack against the United States.

As Rubio saw it, this declaration sufficed to rationalize the use of deadly force. “The United States is under attack from organized criminal narcoterrorists in our hemisphere, and the president is responding in the defense of our country,” he proclaimed in November 2025. Two months later, he added that “we continue to reserve the right to strike drug boats that are bringing drugs toward the United States and are operated by transnational criminal organizations.”

Geoffrey Corn, formerly the U.S. Army’s senior advisor on the law of war, disagreed. “This isn’t stretching the envelope,” he told The New York Times. “This is shredding it.”

Under Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the International Committee of the Red Cross notes that a “non-international armed conflict” involves hostilities between a “non-state armed group” and another such group or a government. “Non-governmental groups involved in the conflict must be treated as ‘parties to the conflict,’ meaning they possess organized armed forces,” the Red Cross states. “The hostilities must reach a minimum level of intensity,” for example when the fighting is collective or the government is compelled to employ military force against insurgents rather than merely police action.

The United Nations likewise states that such conflicts involve “organized Parties” with “organized armed forces.” The violence must surpass a minimum threshold of intensity, distinguishing it from riots, banditry, unorganized and short-lived insurrections, or terrorist activity.

The “armed conflict” Trump describes does not meet those standards. Trump has implicitly admitted as much by attempting to bypass the War Powers Resolution, which governs the introduction or continuation of U.S. forces in situations involving hostilities or imminent hostilities.

The boat strikes do not qualify as “hostilities,” the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel told Congress last fall, because U.S. forces do not face a plausible threat of casualties. That stance underscores the one-sided essence of the violence and undermines Trump’s legal justification, since a “non-international armed conflict” without “hostilities” remains a contradiction, particularly when the supposed enemy is engaged in “an armed attack against the United States.”

Beyond the legal questions, Trump’s moral rationale makes little sense. Drug traffickers have “wrought devastating consequences on American communities for decades, causing the deaths of tens of thousands of United States citizens each year,” he wrote in a letter to Congress two days after the first strike. “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.” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly later claimed that the boat strikes aim to prevent drug traffickers from “murdering more Americans.”

Hegseth and Vice President J.D. Vance offered similar justifications. “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military,” Vance proclaimed on X in September 2025. “These strikes are designed to be lethal and kinetic,” Hegseth stated on X a couple of months afterward. “The explicit goal is to halt deadly drugs, destroy narco-boats, and eliminate the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people.”

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin also endorses summary execution as an appropriate penalty for cocaine smuggling. “I have zero problems with sending them to the bottom of the ocean,” he told reporters in December 2025, while he was still an Oklahoma senator. “I hope they rot in hell for it because they know what they’re doing when they board that boat and traffic drugs to our streets.”

In other words, because Americans sometimes die from illegal drugs, killing suspected drug suppliers is framed as a legitimate act of self-defense and retribution. By the same logic, the government might also justify killing alcohol suppliers, a drug implicated in roughly 178,000 U.S. deaths annually.

U.S. law does not align with Trump, Vance, Hegseth, and Mullin. Although Trump has repeatedly advocated expanding the death penalty for drug offenders, such punishment is not available for smugglers like those he targets, even when they are arrested, tried, and convicted.

In practice, the Justice Department often views the crimes of such low-profile operatives as too minor to prosecute. During the first quarter of the boat strikes, the U.S. military blew up 22 vessels, killing 83 people. In the same period, The New York Times notes, the Coast Guard interdicted 38 vessels suspected of smuggling drugs. Those smugglers were largely sent back to their home countries because the Justice Department declined to prosecute them. Yet Trump maintains that people suspected of the same conduct deserve death.

If a police officer chose to kill a suspected drug dealer rather than arrest him, that officer would be charged with murder. The same applies to killing alleged drug smugglers when there is no imminent threat. Under 18 USC 1111, murder is defined as the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, which covers the high seas and any vessel owned wholly or partly by the United States or its citizens. Under 18 USC 956, anyone within U.S. jurisdiction is guilty of a felony when they conspire to commit murder outside the United States.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice also defines murder as the unlawful, premeditated killing of a person, including the intentional killing of noncombatants. Suspected drug smugglers fall squarely into that category, unless one accepts Trump’s claim of a nonexistent “armed conflict.”

If the United States were truly engaged in a “non-international armed conflict,” a coalition of former military lawyers argued in November 2025, a policy of killing all aboard each boat would be “clearly illegal under international law.” And if no such conflict exists, the Former JAGs Working Group added, “orders to kill defenseless civilians clinging to the wreckage of a vessel our military destroyed would subject everyone from the defense secretary down to the individual who pulled the trigger to murder charges under U.S. law.”

The Campaign Has Not Worked as Advertised

To bolster his portrayal of murder as self-defense, Trump has made extravagant claims about the benefits of blowing up suspected drug boats. “Every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives,” Trump claimed during an Oval Office press conference in October 2025. “Every boat is saving 25,000 lives. The boats get hit, and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean.”

Trump has reiterated that claim, along with his aides. “Every single boat that we strike saves 25,000 American lives,” Pentagon spokesperson Wilson asserted at the same briefing, insisting that all those killed had been conclusively identified as “narcoterrorists.”

As of August 2026, that estimate would imply the boat strikes had averted roughly 1.7 million U.S. drug-related deaths—twenty-four times the toll recorded in 2025. While the arithmetic behind that implausible claim remains opaque, it appears to rest on several faulty assumptions.

First, Trump presumes the targeted boats were heading for the United States, although a substantial portion of sea-borne cocaine is destined for Europe. Second, he conflates cocaine, the principal drug carried on sea routes he has attacked, with fentanyl, which features in far more American deaths but is usually smuggled in small parcels by land via the southern border. Third, he assumes that any amount of drugs would be evenly split into lethal doses consumed by numerous people in one sitting. Fourth, he imagines, contrary to more than a century of interdiction experience, that traffickers do not compensate for seized shipments by sending more. When drugs are seized or destroyed, he contends, the total supply available to Americans is reduced by that amount.

Trump has implicitly contradicted that last premise by asserting that the traditional interdiction method—snaring drugs and discarding them later rather than incinerating them on the spot—was “totally ineffective.” Yet regardless, the drugs are removed from circulation. If the old approach did not meaningfully affect the drug supply, it is hard to see how the new one would—unless the threat of death is sufficiently frightening to deter smuggling.

From the start, Trump signaled that his policy would deter “anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America.” That has not proven true, which is unsurprising given how lucrative prohibition has made drug trafficking and the many ways smugglers can avoid ending up under a U.S. missile.

Thanks to his “swift and brutal” approach, Trump boasted on Truth Social last April, “98.2% of Drugs coming into the U.S. by Ocean or Sea have STOPPED!” That figure echoed numbers he had previously cited. Like the claim that each boat strike saved 25,000 lives, it was difficult to verify.

The White House cited data suggesting that air and marine seizures by U.S. Customs and Border Protection had fallen by 98 percent from July 2025 to November 2025. But it remained unclear whether that drop reflected reduced shipments or successful evasion. And as PolitiFact noted, marijuana accounted for much of the discrepancy. By contrast, the Coast Guard, which “oversees most drug seizures on water” and “primarily targets cocaine,” reported a 200 percent surge in fiscal year 2025 (overlapping with the first month of the boat strikes) compared with its prior years’ averages.

Regardless of the interpretation, it quickly became evident that “blowing up boats hasn’t slowed cocaine traffic” into the United States, as The New York Times observed in late May, almost nine months after Trump launched his “quick and brutal” military campaign.

If Trump were truly denting the cocaine supply (or at least making traffickers pay higher costs that they would need to recoup by charging more), retail prices would likely rise. But according to University of North Carolina drug researcher Nabarun Dasgupta, the Times reported that “street prices for cocaine” in several U.S. cities remained “roughly the same as before the boat strikes began.”

Pressure from the boat strikes might also be seen in adulteration of cocaine with cheaper substances such as levamisole and lidocaine. Yet Dasgupta noted that adulteration rates in 2026 were, if anything, slightly lower than in 2025.

A tightened supply of cocaine would also show up in drug-related deaths. Provisional CDC estimates suggest that deaths involving cocaine dipped slightly in early 2025 but stayed flat in the six months after the boat strikes began.

Although Trump’s strategy has not reduced the quantity of cocaine accessible in the United States, it does seem to have altered smuggling patterns. According to experts consulted by the Times, traffickers shifted from the small speedboats targeted by Trump to overland routes through Central America and to shipments concealed in cargo on larger vessels.

The Washington Post reached parallel conclusions in July. “The Trump administration’s deadly military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats have not reduced the amount of cocaine entering the United States,” it reported, citing Pentagon officials who told lawmakers that strikes in international waters off South and Central America had not diminished cocaine’s purity.

According to an assessment by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Post noted, the strikes had “failed to affect the supply or price of cocaine in the United States” but had caused traffickers to diversify away from go-fast boats and to avoid international waters, opting instead for larger vessels and skimming closer to coastlines where U.S. forces are less likely to open fire. Traffickers were also “leaning more on aircraft, which depart from clandestine airstrips along the Colombian-Venezuelan border and head east toward Guyana and Suriname to dodge U.S. forces.”

An unnamed DEA official quoted by the Post invoked a timeworn analogy familiar to drug policy analysts. “When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other,” he said. “They always find the weak spots and exploit them.”

That general pattern was evident by March, when Sen. Mark Kelly (D–Ariz.) questioned whether drug trafficking had been meaningfully affected by the boat strikes. “These operations raise serious concerns about effectiveness,” he said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Kelly asked Gen. Francis L. Donovan, who oversees the boat strikes as head of U.S. Southern Command, “what evidence” he had that “this campaign is actually degrading cartel operations rather than merely destroying some low-level assets,” “killing some people,” and “displacing some trafficking routes.”

Donovan candidly admitted that “I couldn’t provide you [with] measures of effectiveness for the current effort.” While “we’ve seen changes in the narco-traffickers’ patterns,” he conceded, “the boat strikes aren’t the solution.”

Where Is the Legality Here?

Kelly, a former U.S. Navy pilot, also questioned the legal basis for the campaign. “Where is the legality here?” he wondered in September 2025. There exists “a legal way,” he argued, “to prevent drug dealers from delivering drugs into the United States.” After a briefing that October, Kelly said the Pentagon and the White House “could not give us a logical explanation on how this is legal,” adding that “they were tying themselves in knots trying to explain this.”

A month later, Kelly characterized the legal rationale for the boat strikes as “questionable at best.” Yet he declined to state whether orders to attack the boats were generally unlawful, distinguishing between an “initial strike” and a “second strike” such as the one that killed survivors of the first operation. When asked whether a follow-up assault like that would amount to a “war crime,” he answered that “it seems to.”

In an August 2026 letter to Trump, Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Va.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, stated that his review of classified materials related to the strikes showed they had extended “far beyond” people the Justice Department had claimed “could be lawfully targeted.” In other words, Kaine contended, “the United States has killed individuals who were not involved in narcotrafficking,” whom he described as “murder victims.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) has been more explicit in condemning the boat strikes, underscoring the absence of any real due process. When the Coast Guard stops vessels suspected of carrying drugs, Paul noted in October 2025, it finds contraband only about a quarter of the time. The implication, he argued, was that the government would blow up boats even when they contained no drugs aboard. He added that “Congress must not allow the executive branch to become judge, jury, and executioner.”

Even law professor John Yoo, who defended “enhanced interrogation methods” as a Justice Department attorney under President George W. Bush, expressed concerns about Trump’s novel use of the military. “These attacks risk crossing the line between crime-fighting and war,” he wrote in a September 2025 Washington Post essay. While acknowledging the harm of illegal drugs, he emphasized that “the U.S. cannot wage war against any source of harm to Americans.”

The Trump administration’s explanation to Congress “doesn’t really answer the questions that would enable us to decide whether this is an appropriate use of force,” Yoo added in a CNN interview the following month. “The United States can’t wage war constitutionally, I think, or legally, against criminal groups.”

Yet it has pursued such a war, though not in a strictly legal or constitutional way. Will this approach fade with future administrations, or will it endure as a standard instrument of drug-law enforcement? Perhaps the latter, should a successor like Vance, Rubio, or Cotton win the presidency and hail Trump’s boat strikes as a model.

Even if the 2028 Republican nominee prevails, Carnegie Mellon drug-policy scholar Jonathan Caulkins notes he “should reverse this policy,” since “it carries a heavy price in national reputation relative to its practical benefits.” While “the MAGA faithful” might resist such a shift, Caulkins adds in an email, “most Republicans—and many conservatives—believe that no person is above the law,” and Trump’s stance on that principle appears unusually defiant.

Ethan Nadelmann, founder and former executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, shares a similar view. “The visceral drama of the strikes resonated with Trump’s political base,” he states in an email. “And I see it as integral to Trump’s belief that laws—domestic and international—do not apply to him.”

While “Trump may be laying down a precedent for future Republican leaders who follow in his footsteps,” Nadelmann observes, “I’d be surprised if Democratic successors copied it.” Yet he notes that “the fact that the military campaign against suspected drug boats did not alter the flow of cocaine is at best a minor variable,” given that both parties have spent enormous sums on interdiction for decades despite abundant evidence that such efforts hardly affect illicit drug use or markets in the U.S.”

Douglas Berman, executive director of The Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, similarly believes that whether Trump’s innovation endures may depend on which party wins the next presidential race. Given “the public backlash against Trump and the apparent lack of efficacy,” a Democratic president is unlikely to replicate his approach, Berman says in an email. But “I expect future GOP leaders will not oppose these strikes in principle,” he adds, and a future president “could certainly cite the drug-boat precedent if they wish to use military power against cartels or other drug ‘bogeymen.'”

Although the boat strikes “have shifted the drug-enforcement Overton window,” Berman suggests he does not anticipate these kinds of measures becoming the norm absent compelling evidence that they achieve something meaningful. Still, such tactics might become standard if Republicans can persuade the public that the military campaign contributed to recent declines in drug-related deaths.

Eric Trump, the president’s son, gave it another try in January, urging his father to “keep blowing the shit out of those boats,” pointing to a noticeable drop in fentanyl-related deaths. The inconvenient truth for both Trumps: that decline occurred during the Biden administration. In any event, it was difficult to see how blowing up boats carrying cocaine could plausibly reduce fentanyl deaths.

The current president remains unfazed by such logical and moral complexities, and he shows little awareness of the moral and legal questions raised by his deadly anti-drug crusade. Whether future presidents will follow his lead may hinge on how voters balance these issues.