The black-and-white video President Donald Trump released yesterday was, in some respects, familiar. The grainy clip, only 30 seconds long and taken from a U.S. aircraft, shows a small boat skipping across the waves, bracketed by crosshairs. The crosshairs move in closer. Seconds later, a missile explodes, engulfing the boat in fire and destroying everything and everyone on board. That missile, Trump said, killed 11 “narco-terrorists” on an illicit smuggling mission that threatened American lives.
In the near-quarter-century since the 9/11 attacks, four presidents have launched strikes against suspected terrorists in at least seven nations, including Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan. But with this week’s air strike in international waters in the southern Caribbean, Trump expanded the counterterrorism campaign’s mission to a new part of the world, against a different kind of threat. And in doing so, he drew the military even deeper into crime fighting, work that has traditionally been outside its scope.
Both domestically and internationally, the U.S. armed forces are tackling threats once assigned to police officers, Drug Enforcement Administration agents, Coast Guardsmen, and other law-enforcement personnel. They are escorting immigration officers as they arrest undocumented immigrants in American cities, combatting crime with their presence in the U.S. capital, and stopping drugs at the southern border. Off the shores of Venezuela, U.S. ships are massing in a show of force against drug traffickers, a threat long addressed through interdiction at U.S. points of entry or in international or U.S. waters—not through lethal strikes.
“Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up—and it’ll happen again,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters today. “Maybe it’s happening right now.”
The new tactics represent a shift away from the vision, dating back to the colonial revolt against an overbearing superpower, that U.S. armed forces should defend the country from external threats but not be used to routinely enforce the law.
Under the Trump administration, the mission has changed. Terrorist threats are no longer limited to groups or individuals plotting violent attacks against America, and invasions don’t just come from foreign adversaries. A threat could be someone carrying drugs bound for the United States; an invasion could be a collection of migrants crossing the border. And just as the military has used precision strikes to eliminate al-Qaeda or Islamic State leaders thousands of miles from U.S. shores, it can now target drug runners operating far closer to home.
Within U.S. borders, the White House has deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles and to Washington, D.C., with Chicago, Baltimore, and New Orleans all being eyed for future missions in the name of reducing what Trump has described as “rampant violence.”
Yesterday’s strike in the Caribbean came after Trump secretly signed a directive authorizing Pentagon action against drug smugglers earlier this summer. The boat that was struck was chosen as the first target based on actionable intelligence, and followed the development of a policy and the completion of a legal review, two U.S. defense officials told us. Plans to strike the vessel were in place by last week, but the United States waited until the boat was in international waters. Without providing details or evidence, Trump said today that there had been “massive amounts of drugs” on the boat and that others involved in drug smuggling would alter their behavior when they saw the video.
Trump, in a social-media post following the strike, said that the United States had “positively identified” the vessel’s crew as members of Tren de Aragua. The administration has alleged that the criminal gang is controlled by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and deemed it a foreign terrorist organization in February. The Venezuelan government has denied ties to Tred de Aragua.
“We have to protect our country, and we’re going to. Venezuela has been a very bad actor. They’ve been, as you know, they’ve been sending millions of people into our country, many of them Tren de Aragua, some of the worst gangs, some of the worst people anywhere in the world in terms of gangs,” Trump said from the Oval Office.
The administration is now preparing for a sustained campaign of military force against certain Latin American drug cartels, two administration officials told us. The military strikes would be a “new way to win this,” one of the officials said.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in an interview on Fox News that “President Trump is willing to go on offense in ways that others have not seen.”
But critics say that such tactics haven’t been seen for a reason. Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer now with the International Crisis Group, told us that the administration’s use of the terrorist designation to provide legal authority to a growing array of military actions is a problem: “As Americans, we should be very concerned that the government is out killing people on specious legal grounds, especially when that could be turned inward.”
Laura Cristina Dib, the Venezuela program director at the Washington Office on Latin America, a D.C.-based nonprofit, told us that this week’s strike represents an intensification of U.S. pressure on Maduro. Dib said that widespread international belief that Maduro rigged his nation’s election last year means that few countries are likely to come to his defense. “At the same time, this also sets a problematic precedent in the region,” she told us. The U.S. is now conducting lethal attacks in the Western Hemisphere without a public accounting of the steps taken beforehand, including whether the alleged traffickers were given any warning and what evidence had been collected to justify the attack. Trump’s recent deployment of a suite of naval assets to the Caribbean suggests that more strikes could be coming.
The administration has yet to publicly outline its legal justification for the strikes, but legal experts told us that Trump is likely relying on the Constitution’s Article II authority as commander in chief. There was no congressional notification beforehand, congressional officials told us.
“The approach the president is taking has already been pioneered during the war on terror,” Peter Feaver, a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University, told us. “Applying this approach to the drug mission would have been considered and debated in every administration since Reagan.” But none of Trump’s predecessors ultimately decided to go through with it.
The new military operation is intended to be part of a widening pressure
campaign against Maduro, whom Hegseth described as “running effectively as a kingpin of a drug narco state.”
Hegseth declined to rule out the possibility that such missions might eventually lead to an attempt to oust Maduro by force. That, he told Fox News, “was a presidential decision.” The White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told us that this week’s strike “was conducted against the operations of a designated terrorist organization and was taken in defense of vital U.S. national interests and in the collective self-defense of other nations who have long suffered due to the narcotics trafficking and violent cartel activities of such organizations.”
Eric Carpenter, a professor of military law at Florida International University and a former Army lawyer, told us that the administration’s decision to name Latin American drug syndicates as foreign terrorist groups represents a novel step: That classification was previously limited to politically motivated organizations such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, and didn’t apply to criminal gangs. But he said that the designation does not on its own justify the strike.
The Foreign Terrorist Organization designation “doesn’t connect to any use of force or authorization from Congress. It allows the U.S. to prosecute others for providing aid, for example,” Carpenter said.
The Trump administration has also cited those terror designations as it invokes the Alien Enemies Act in its attempt to deport suspected cartel members from the United States. But earlier this year, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that the Venezuelan government does not control Tren de Aragua. That finding—which a senior official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence sought to change—undercut the main pillar of Trump’s plan to deport alleged Tren de Aragua members from the United States. And it now complicates his efforts to justify yesterday’s strike.
The deployment of the National Guard also faced legal challenges this week. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer of San Francisco ruled yesterday that the Trump administration had illegally deployed National Guardsmen and Marines to Los Angeles over the summer to counter protests, saying that the administration had violated laws that prohibit U.S. armed forces from conducting law enforcement inside the country’s borders.
The ruling revealed for the first time some of the internal debate around the deployment. Major General Scott Sherman, a three-decade Army veteran who was in charge of the Guardsmen in Los Angeles, had objected to placing troops in the middle of a historic city park as part of a planned “show of presence,” arguing that they should not be engaged in police-like functions.
Gregory Bovino, a senior Customs and Border Protection official, criticized Sherman for taking that traditional view of the role of the U.S. armed forces and, according to the ruling, questioned his “loyalty to the country.”
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