The Trump administration declared the start of a new and potentially violent campaign against Venezuelan cartels on Wednesday, defending a deadly U.S. military strike on a boat that officials said was carrying drugs even as specialists in the law of war questioned the legality of the attack.
The U.S. Navy has long intercepted and boarded ships suspected of smuggling drugs in international waters, typically with a Coast Guard officer temporarily in charge to invoke law enforcement authority. Tuesday’s direct attack in the Caribbean was a marked departure from that decades-long approach.
The administration has said 11 people were aboard the vessel. It was unclear whether they were given a chance to surrender before the United States attacked.
The Trump administration has not offered any legal rationale. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an appearance on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday that administration officials “knew exactly who was in that boat” and “exactly what they were doing,” although he did not offer evidence.
“President Trump is willing to go on offense in ways that others have not seen,” he added.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at a news conference in Mexico City that seizing drug shipments in recent years had not dissuaded cartels and traffickers. “What will stop them is when we blow up and get rid of them,” he said.
But some officials at the Defense Department privately expressed concern on Wednesday about the administration’s shifting narratives, including where the vessel was headed. Mr. Rubio had said on Tuesday that it was going to Trinidad, while Mr. Trump said the United States. On Wednesday, Mr. Rubio changed his version, saying the drug-laden boat was bound for the United States.
The secretary said in Mexico City that drug cartels and traffickers, including those on the boat, “pose an immediate threat to the United States, period.”
Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said on social media that 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang, whom he called “Narco terrorists,” were killed in the strike.
Mr. Trump’s post was accompanied by a video of what appeared to be a speedboat cutting through the water, with a number of people on board. An explosion then appears to blow it up.
Congress has not authorized any armed conflict against Tren de Aragua or Venezuela, and several legal experts said they were unaware of any precedent for claiming that a country could invoke self-defense as a basis to target drug trafficking suspects with lethal force.
The Trump administration has deemed several gangs and drug cartels to be terrorist organizations, including Tren de Aragua, and Mr. Rubio earlier maintained that this meant the government could use military force against them. But as a matter of law, that is inaccurate: Such designations allow the government to sanction such groups, including by freezing their assets, but do not authorize combat activity against them.
Congress in 2001 authorized the use of military force against Al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan, and the executive branch under administrations of both parties has stretched that law to justify warfare against related groups of Sunni Islamist militants elsewhere in the world.
But that law does not authorize war against unrelated groups that the executive branch has chosen to label as “terrorists.”
“Tren de Aragua is not a military organization in the same way that ISIS or Al Qaeda or Al Shabab is,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and specialist in the law of war. “The previous designation of Tren de Aragua as a ‘foreign terrorist organization’ does not itself provide the authority for using military force.”
Two Defense Department officials also said on Wednesday that they did not see how the 2001 war authorization could be used to justify military action against drug cartels in the Caribbean.
A third official said that for now there were no plans to go much further than Mr. Hegseth’s comments on Wednesday to explain details of the operation, which several U.S. officials described as the first in a planned series in the coming weeks.
One senior U.S. official said a Special Operations aircraft — either an attack helicopter or an MQ-9 Reaper drone — carried out the attack after U.S. surveillance aircraft and other sensors, including electronic eavesdropping platforms, monitored cartel maritime traffic for weeks before the strike.
“We have tapes of them speaking,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Wednesday. “There was massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people, and everybody fully understands that. In fact, you see it, you see the bags of drugs all over the boat, and they were hit. Obviously they won’t be doing it again.”
Mr. Trump’s post on Tuesday was accompanied by the only video released so far depicting what the administration says took place. It appears to show a long speedboat moving briskly through open water when an apparent explosion causes the craft to burst into flames. The video is mostly black and white; it is not clear enough to see how many people are on the boat or whether it is carrying drugs. A Defense Department official questioned whether a boat that size could hold 11 people.
It is also unclear why the military did not interdict the boat instead of blowing it up. In the past, the Coast Guard and even the U.S. Navy have interdicted boats bound for the United States with drugs, detaining and prosecuting the crew.
Senior congressional Democrats said on Wednesday that stopping the spread of drugs was a top priority, but not in the way Mr. Trump was doing it.
“The administration has not identified the authority under which this action was taken, raising the question of its legality and constitutionality,” said Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. “The lack of information and transparency from the administration is even more concerning.”
A former senior federal law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military matter, said the attack was a “significant change” in U.S. anti-narcotics operations.
“In all of my years of doing this,” the former official said, “I’ve never seen the U.S. military say, ‘OK, this is a drug shipment,’ and then just blow it up.”
The former official, who has years of direct experience in fighting drug cartels, raised several other questions about the attack on the fast boat.
First, the former official said, Tren de Aragua was not known for handling large shipments of cocaine or fentanyl. Instead it was known to focus on smuggling what is known as pink cocaine — a psychedelic substance that is generally made by combining ketamine and MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, a stimulant that can cause hallucinations.
The former official also said it was unusual to have 11 people manning a vessel that could easily be crewed by two or three, especially since traffickers are always trying to maximize the amount of cargo space devoted to carrying drugs, not human beings.
In the former official’s opinion, it was more likely that the vessel was carrying migrants on a human smuggling run. It would be impossible to know for sure, however, given that any evidence of drug smuggling was destroyed in the attack.
On Aug. 18, the Justice Department announced that nearly 30 people, including some leaders and members of Tren de Aragua, had been charged in two separate indictments in Colorado.
The indictments, which stemmed from a nine-month investigation into the gang’s activities in an apartment complex in suburban Denver, accused the defendants of murder-for-hire, weapons offenses and selling drugs such as methamphetamine, cocaine and pink cocaine. But the charges did not include accusations of Tren de Aragua smuggling illegal substances out of Venezuela.
A separate indictment, unsealed in April in Manhattan, accused 27 other current or former Tren de Aragua members of murder, assault, sex trafficking, human smuggling and drug distribution, but said nothing about gang members shipping illegal narcotics out of Venezuela.
President Trump signed a still-secret directive last month instructing the Pentagon to use military force against some Latin American drug cartels that his administration has labeled “terrorist” organizations.
Around the same time, the administration declared that a Venezuelan criminal group was a terrorist organization and that Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, was its leader, while calling his government illegitimate.
In recent days, Mr. Maduro has accused Mr. Rubio of trying to drag Mr. Trump into a bloody war in the Caribbean, one that the Venezuela leader said would stain Mr. Trump’s reputation.
Mr. Maduro has threatened to respond to an armed attack in Venezuela with “maximum rebellion” and violence, while also saying he hopes that the U.S.-Venezuela relationship can continue with dialogue — not guns. He has also said that the United States is really after Venezuela’s oil.
In an interview, Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan journalist and expert on Tren de Aragua, said that the criminal group did handle some cocaine on Venezuela’s northern coast. But several criminal groups are operating in the area, she said, and it is not clear whether Tren de Aragua handles shipping of the drug through the Caribbean.
Amid the belligerent rhetoric, the Pentagon has been amassing a small armada of warships in the southern Caribbean, to include three guided-missile destroyers. The Navy has also deployed the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group — including the U.S.S. San Antonio, the U.S.S. Iwo Jima and the U.S.S. Fort Lauderdale, carrying 4,500 sailors — and the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, with 2,200 Marines, Defense Department officials said.
Several P-8 surveillance planes and at least one submarine have also deployed to the region, officials said.
Officials have indicated that blowing up boats suspected of transporting drugs is not the only way the U.S. military could go after cartels. Special Operations troops could also target drug operatives believed to be of higher intelligence value in seize-and-capture missions, they said.
Julie Turkewitz, Luke Broadwater, John Ismay and Carol Rosenberg contributed reporting.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.
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