Donald Trump has directed three more strikes targeting alleged drug-trafficking boats, killing at least 14 people, raising the death toll from the administration’s war on drug cartels to more than 50.
According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, U.S. military assets carried out three strikes on four vessels in the Pacific Ocean Monday, marking at least 13 strikes on 14 vessels since early September.
At least one person survived the latest attacks, he said.
“The four vessels were known by our intelligence apparatus, transiting along known narco-trafficking routes, and carrying narcotics,” according to Hegseth.
Eight men were killed in the first strike, another four men were killed in a second strike, and three more men were killed in a third strike, he said.
U.S. military personnel performed search and rescue operations to retrieve the survivor, and Mexican authorities “accepted the case and assumed responsibility for coordinating the rescue,” according to Hegseth.
“The Department has spent over TWO DECADES defending other homelands. Now, we’re defending our own,” he said. “These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than Al-Qaeda, and they will be treated the same. We will track them, we will network them, and then, we will hunt and kill them.”
Last month, the administration declared that the United States is formally engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels that the president has labeled “unlawful combatants,” according to a notice to members of Congress.
The notice claims cartels are “nonstate armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States” and are now engaged in a “noninternational armed conflict” — or war with a non-state actor.
Critics, including members of Congress, have argued that the Trump administration’s air campaign against alleged smugglers amounts to illegal extrajudicial killings. Lawmakers and civil rights groups are pressing the administration for any evidence or legal arguments to justify the attacks.
Asked last week why he won’t seek permission from Congress for his military campaign taking aim at South American regimes he claims are fueling a drug epidemic in the United States, Trump said his government is “just going to kill people” instead.
“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 during a White House roundtable with administration officials.
“They’re going to be, like, dead, OK,” he said.
While the U.S. military builds up a presence off the coast of Venezuela, the Trump administration is mulling potential plans for attacking the country, an operation that risks spilling over into a regional war.
Venezuela is not a major cocaine-producing country, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Virtually all coca crops are inside Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, and the Drug Enforcement Administration under Trump did not mention Venezuela in a March report on the state of cocaine trafficking.
Still, the Trump administration has sought to link Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to the drug trade, as well as the gang Tren de Aragua, despite reports from intelligence agencies that have denied ties between the group and Maduro’s government.
And while the administration continues to describe those killed as “terrorists,” two people who survived a recent strike in the Caribbean were repatriated to their home countries rather than being detained by the United States.
Earlier this month, Trump said he authorized the CIA to perform covert operations inside Venezuela, claiming that Maduro’s government “emptied their prisons into the United States of America” and flooded the country with drugs.
Venezuela claims to have foiled a CIA-backed group plotting an alleged false-flag attack on an American warship, in what Maduro’s government claims is an attempt to draw the country into a “full military confrontation.”
On Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier — the world’s largest — and its accompanying strike group to a command area that encompasses the Caribbean and South American waters.
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,” according to chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell.
“These forces will enhance and augment existing capabilities to disrupt narcotics trafficking and degrade and dismantle [transnational criminal organizations],” he added.
Flight-tracking data also showed a B-1B bomber operating over the Caribbean near Venezuela’s coast, which Trump denied.
