U.S. military forces have stuck another alleged drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean, destroying the vessel and killing all six aboard — as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced he’s sent a massive aircraft carrier to the region.
Hegseth announced the boat strike in a social media post claiming his department had carried out what he called a “lethal kinetic strike” on the vessel, which he claimed had been operated by members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
Writing on X, he claimed the boat had been “known by our intelligence to be involved in illicit narcotics smuggling” while traveling along what he described as a “known narco-trafficking route” and carrying drugs.
He also said all six people aboard had died in the strike, referring to them as “terrorists” in keeping with the Trump administration’s designation of Tren de Aragua as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
“If you are a narco-terrorist smuggling drugs in our hemisphere, we will treat you like we treat Al-Qaeda. Day or NIGHT, we will map your networks, track your people, hunt you down, and kill you,” Hegseth added.
Hegseth’s announcement brings the death toll in the Trump administration’s weeks-long campaign against alleged drug traffickers to more than 40 across multiple strikes in both the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.
The latest strike comes just a day after the Pentagon boss revealed a pair of attacks that killed a total of five — one strike against a boat off Colombia’s coast that killed two, and another on Wednesday that killed three more.
As of Friday, there have been now ten U.S. strikes on purported drug smuggling vessels by military forces in what the Trump administration has described as a war against foreign drug cartels.
In what appears to be a further escalation of that effort, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell later posted on X that Hegseth had exercised his authority to order the USS Gerald R. Ford and its accompanying Carrier Strike Group to the U.S. Southern Command area of responsibility, which encompasses the Caribbean and South American waters.
Parnell wrote that the “enhanced force presence” of the massive aircraft carrier and its escort ships would “bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States homeland and our security in the Western Hemisphere.”
“These forces will enhance and augment existing capabilities to disrupt narcotics trafficking and degrade and dismantle [transnational criminal organizations],” he added.
Critics have argued the Trump administration’s air campaign against alleged smugglers amounts to illegal extrajudicial killings, while members of Congress and civil rights groups are pressing the administration for evidence and the legal memos shared among White House officials to justify the attacks.
Thus far, the administration has been unwilling to share any of the intelligence used to select the boats that have been targeted or the legal rationale behind the strikes. And while the administration continues to describe those killed as “terrorists,” two who survived a recent strike in the Caribbean were repatriated to their home countries rather than detained.
The apparent repatriation of people labeled “terrorists” by the government — rather than face prosecution in the United States — also raises additional legal questions about the operations, including whether to treat survivors as wartime detainees or transfer them to military or criminal authorities for prosecution.
Colombia President Gustavo Petro said a U.S. strike in September targeted a civilian boat in distress — not a drug-smuggling vessel — and accused Trump of “murder.”
Trump, on his Truth Social, called Petro “an illegal drug leader” and accused his government of “ripping off” American aid.
The majority of the cocaine smuggled into the United States arrives from the Pacific Ocean, but the Trump administration largely focused its attacks off the coast of Venezuela and the Caribbean in an apparent military-led campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
While the Trump administration has declared the U.S. to be engaged in what it calls an “armed conflict” with drug cartels that President Donald Trump has called “unlawful combatants” — an invocation of wartime authority to justify the use of force — Trump has said he will not be asking Congress to green-light his actions despite clear provisions in the U.S. Constitution which reserve the power to declare war to the legislative branch.
At a White House roundtable on anti-drug efforts on Thursday, Trump ruled out asking for a declaration of war or authorization for use of military force against the cartels or the South American governments that he claims are responsible for supporting the cartels.
“I don’t think we're going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We’re going to kill them,” Trump said.
Alex Woodward contributed reporting from New York
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