At least 61 people have been killed in 14 U.S. military strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean since early September. President Donald Trump has said he is targeting “narcoterrorists” who threaten American lives with lethal substances, and the administration has told Congress the U.S. is in “armed conflict” with drug cartels operating in South America.
But Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona called the strikes “sanctioned murder.” And without any evidence from the administration for its claims about the cargo or the identities and affiliations of the people on the boats, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said the strikes are “extrajudicial killings.”
Some legal experts, meanwhile, have said the U.S. actions were “not lawful.”
Here, we will address what is known about the targets of the strikes, the trafficking of illicit substances from South and Central America to the U.S., and what experts are saying about the legality of the Trump administration’s escalation of the war on drugs.
Who are the targets of the U.S. military strikes?
On the first day of his second term in office, Trump signed an executive order designating drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” who “present an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” He declared a national emergency “to deal with those threats.”
Since the summer, the U.S. has been building up its military presence in the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela, including the deployment of 6,000 sailors and Marines and eight warships, as well as aircraft based in Puerto Rico.
On Sept. 2, Trump announced in a Truth Social post the first strike by his administration on what he said were members of one of the cartels. “Earlier this morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists,” Trump said. The attack in the Caribbean “occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States. The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action,” he said in the post, which included black-and-white video of an open, manned boat being blown up.
Trump also said in the post that the cartel operates “under the control” of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The administration did not provide any details regarding the U.S. military operation, the identities of the people killed, or what specific drugs were on the boat.
The New York Times has tracked the strikes and the number of people killed in each attack.
The Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy organization, reported the Sept. 2 strike occurred between Venezuela and the islands of Trinidad and Tobago. WOLA also has tracked the subsequent strikes on boats in the Caribbean, near the Dominican Republic, off the coast of Venezuela, and strikes in the eastern Pacific near Colombia.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro said one of the U.S. strikes had killed a fisherman, not a drug cartel member, whom he identified as Alejandro Carranza. Trump responded on Truth Social by calling Petro an “illegal drug leader” and cutting funds to Colombia to battle narcotics trafficking.
More recent U.S. strikes have been announced on social media by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who posted on Oct. 28 that “four vessels operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations (DTO) trafficking narcotics in the Eastern Pacific” had been hit and “14 narco-terrorists were killed during the three strikes, with one survivor.”
As in the aftermath of the other boat strikes, Hegseth did not provide the identities of the people on the boats, evidence of what drugs they were transporting, or other details. He wrote, “We will track them, we will network them, and then, we will hunt and kill them.”
Hegseth has repeatedly said in his posts that the boats were “transiting along known narco-trafficking routes.” He has also compared drug traffickers to al Qaeda terrorists, saying: “Just as Al Qaeda waged war on our homeland, these cartels are waging war on our border and our people.”
Hegseth said Mexican authorities were looking for the survivor of the Oct. 28 strike. Two survivors of an earlier strike on a boat in October were returned to their home countries rather than held for prosecution in the U.S.
Trump wrote on Truth Social on Oct. 18, “It was my great honor to destroy a very large DRUG-CARRYING SUBMARINE that was navigating towards the United States on a well known narcotrafficking transit route. U.S. Intelligence confirmed this vessel was loaded up with mostly Fentanyl, and other illegal narcotics. There were four known narcoterrorists on board the vessel. Two of the terrorists were killed. … The two surviving terrorists are being returned to their Countries of origin, Ecuador and Colombia, for detention and prosecution.”
We reached out to the White House to ask why the survivors of the boat strikes were not arrested for prosecution in the U.S., but we did not receive a response.
What drugs are being trafficked by boat?
Trump’s Oct. 18 Truth Social post about a vessel in the Caribbean “loaded up with mostly Fentanyl” is a rare instance in which the administration identified specific drugs it said were aboard a targeted boat.
It would also be a rare example of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, being trafficked by sea, and it is unlikely that it came from Venezuela or Colombia.
The State Department’s 2025 “International Narcotics Control Strategy Report” said the department, “in consultation with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and other relevant agencies, has identified Mexico as the only significant source of illicit fentanyl and fentanyl analogues significantly affecting the United States during the preceding calendar year.”
A DEA fact sheet says fentanyl is “primarily manufactured in foreign clandestine labs and smuggled into the United States through Mexico.”
According to reporting by the Times, Venezuela “plays essentially no role in the production or smuggling of fentanyl.”
Boats from Venezuela and Colombia do smuggle cocaine through the Caribbean and the Pacific en route to other countries, including the U.S., the Times reported.
A 2023 report by the Government Accountability Office said the State Department “described Venezuela as a preferred drug trafficking route, predominately for moving cocaine to global markets.”
Venezuela’s neighbor, Colombia, “produces about 90 percent of the cocaine powder reaching” the U.S., according to a DEA fact sheet. But “most of the cocaine entering the United States comes through Mexico,” the fact sheet also says.
Both drugs continue to take a toll on American lives. Nearly 73,000 drug overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2023 involved the use of synthetic opioids — primarily fentanyl — though the number declined about 2% from 2022 to 2023, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The number of overdose deaths involving cocaine has risen steadily since 2012 to nearly 30,000 deaths in 2023. Those deaths often involved a combination of cocaine mixed with fentanyl.
Trump has repeatedly overstated the number of drug overdose deaths in the U.S., as we’ve written. Provisional overdose death data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics indicated that overdose deaths had declined more than 24% from 105,007 deaths in 2023 to 79,383 in 2024, CDC spokesperson Gabriel Alvarado had told us.
Are the boat strikes lawful?
The Trump administration has not provided many details regarding its legal justification for attacking the boats off the coasts of South America.
Days after the first strike, Hegseth told a reporter, “We have the absolute and complete authority to conduct that. First of all, just the defense of the American people alone.”
The U.S. Naval Institute News reported that the administration “describes the strikes as military self-defense operations under U.S. Title 10,” the code that describes the president’s authority regarding the armed forces.
The administration sent a confidential notice to Congress saying that Trump had decided that the U.S. was engaged in an “armed conflict” with the drug cartels and that suspected drug traffickers are “unlawful combatants,” the Times reported in early October.
The administration also has cited the president’s powers to take defensive actions as commander in chief under Article II of the Constitution. Members of Congress have argued that Article I grants them the power to declare war.
Sen. Paul, in an Oct. 26 interview on Fox News, said, “We haven’t had a briefing, to be clear. We’ve got no information. … The Constitution says that when you go to war, Congress has to vote on it.”
“So far, they have alleged that these people are drug dealers,” Paul said. “No one said their name. No one said what evidence. No one has said whether they’re armed. And we’ve had no evidence presented. So, at this point I would call them extrajudicial killings.”
The same day, in an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” Sen. Gallego said, “It’s murder. It’s very simple. If this president feels that they’re doing something illegally, he should be using the Coast Guard. If it’s an act of war, then you use our military, and then you come and talk to us first,” he said, referring to Congress. “But this is murder. It’s sanctioned murder.”
On CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on the same day, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina defended the boat strikes, saying Trump “has all the authority in the world” to order military strikes on drug boats. “This is not murder,” Graham said, “this is protecting America from being poisoned from narco-terrorists coming from Venezuela and Colombia.”
John B. Bellinger III, adjunct senior fellow in international and national security law at the Council on Foreign Relations, told us, “Although the scope of presidential authority to order the use of military force is hotly debated, presidents of both parties have long used military force without congressional approval for a wide array of purposes they deem to be in the national interest. The better legal argument is that President Trump does have authority under Article II of the Constitution to order the strikes.”
But while Trump “arguably has authority under the Constitution to order the strikes, as a matter of international law, the boats are not lawful military targets,” Bellinger, who served as senior associate counsel to President George W. Bush, said in an email.
“There has been no evidence that the boats and their occupants were planning armed attacks against the United States justifying the use of military force in self-defense,” he said. “The Trump Administration has claimed that the United States is in an ‘armed conflict’ with unspecified drug trafficking groups but the drug traffickers’ actions to traffic drugs do not fit the accepted international definition of an armed conflict.
“Most Americans will recognize that comparing drug cartels to Al Qaida is a false comparison. Al Qaida was directly responsible for killing over 3,000 Americans on [Sept. 11, 2001] and in prior terrorist attacks against American soldiers and civilians. Drug cartels commit violent acts and supply drugs that have resulted in the tragic deaths of thousands of Americans, but unlike Al Qaida, these groups are not engaged in an armed conflict with the United States and their members are not combatants,” Bellinger said.
“The goal of these drug cartels is to make money, not to terrorize Americans. The appropriate way to deal with suspected drug traffickers is not to blow them up but rather to arrest and prosecute them, either in the United States or in their own countries,” he said.
Michael Becker, an assistant professor at Trinity College Dublin School of Law, told BBC Verify, “The fact that U.S. officials describe the individuals killed by the U.S. strike as narco-terrorists does not transform them into lawful military targets. … The U.S. is not engaged in an armed conflict with Venezuela or the Tren de Aragua criminal organization.”
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