The U.S. military struck a boat for the second time this month, President Trump said on Monday, as his administration continued its deadly campaign against Venezuelan drug cartels that it has accused of bringing fentanyl into the United States.
The strike occurred in international waters and killed three people, Mr. Trump said in a social media post.
“This morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a SECOND Kinetic Strike against positively identified, extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels and narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” Mr. Trump wrote.
Mr. Trump said the boat was heading to the United States, but he did not offer more precise details about the location.
Mr. Trump posted a video on social media that edited together several clips of aerial surveillance. It showed a speedboat bobbing in the water, with several people and several packages onboard, before a fiery explosion engulfed the vessel.
It was not immediately clear how the U.S. military attacked the boat.
Legal specialists condemned the U.S. military action on Monday as illegal, as they had the first attack.
“Trump is normalizing what I consider to be an unlawful strike,” said Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, a retired top judge advocate general for the Navy from 2000 to 2002.
While the president said in his post that “these extremely violent drug trafficking cartels POSE A THREAT to U.S. National Security, Foreign Policy, and vital U.S. Interests,” and that the people killed were “positively identified,” he did not identify a specific organization with which they were alleged to be associated.
Mr. Trump in July signed a still-secret order directing the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American criminal gangs and drug cartels.
On Sept. 2, in what appeared to be the first act carrying out that directive, the United States conducted a deadly military strike on a boat that had left Venezuelan waters. Announcing the strike, Mr. Trump said that the boat was carrying drugs for a gang and that 11 people were killed.
The U.S. Navy has eight warships in the Caribbean, and the Pentagon has ordered armed MQ-9 Reaper drones and F-35 fighter jets, among other aircraft, to Puerto Rico. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made an unannounced visit to Puerto Rico last week.
The Pentagon on Monday offered no other details on the strike, referring to Mr. Trump’s social media post.
The Trump administration has not offered a detailed legal theory about why it is lawful — and not murder or a war crime — to summarily kill people who are suspected of a crime when the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard could instead have interdicted their boats and potentially arrested them for prosecution, as they have long done in the Caribbean.
But it has gestured at the outlines of a theory by arguing that drug smuggling amounts to an imminent threat at a time when some 100,000 Americans die each year from drug overdoses and saying that Mr. Trump has directed strikes at such vessels as a matter of national self-defense.
The White House also asserted that the first strike was consistent with the laws of armed conflict.
Specialists in the laws about use of force have strongly rejected that idea, noting that the crime of drug smuggling has never been seen as equivalent to an imminent armed attack that can trigger a right to use lethal force in self-defense, and that Congress has not authorized any armed conflict with drug cartels.
“The administration has not even seriously tried to present a legal argument to justify the premeditated killing of the people aboard these two vessels,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and specialist in the laws of armed conflict who has written critically about Mr. Trump’s earlier strike. “The U.S. president does not have a license to kill suspected drug smugglers on that basis alone.”
Mr. Trump’s administration has deemed several Latin American criminal gangs and drug cartels to be “terrorist” organizations — a move that broke new ground since they are motivated by illicit profit rather than ideological goals. On that contested basis, he and his aides have taken to referring to suspected drug smugglers as “narco-terrorists.”
The laws that enable the executive branch to designate foreign groups as “terrorists” permit economic sanctions, like freezing assets, but do not convey legal authority to use wartime force — killing drug smuggling suspects as if they were combatants in a war.
In an interview with Newsmax broadcast on Monday, Mr. Trump’s top counterterrorism adviser, Sebastian Gorka, argued that drug cartels had “declared war on us” and said that obtaining congressional authorization to use armed force against drug cartels was not possible because they are not nation-states. He did not explain why Congress was able to do that in 2001, when it authorized armed force against the terrorist group Al Qaeda.
The second strike came after The New York Times reported that the boat destroyed on Sept. 2 had altered its course and appeared to have turned around before the attack started because the people onboard had apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking it, according to American officials familiar with the matter.
The 29-second video Mr. Trump had released showed a speedboat in the water from several vantage points, with several people and several packages onboard, before a fiery explosion engulfed the vessel. But the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the clip had not shown the whole story, including the turning around of the boat and the repeated strikes upon it even after it was disabled before it finally sank.
Legal specialists like Admiral Guter have said the apparent turning around of the boat further undermined the case using lethal force against it as self-defense.
Defense Department officials briefed some staff members and lawmakers with the Senate and House Armed Services Committees last week. Several of the officials said that the administration did not offer evidence of legal justification, other than Mr. Trump’s assertion of “self-defense” for the first deadly strike.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday night, Mr. Trump complained about the flow of drugs out of Venezuela, which he attributed to the group Tren de Aragua.
“They’re trying to get out, but we’re stopping them successfully at the border,” he said.
He called Tren de Aragua, which the State Department in February designated a foreign terrorist organization, “probably the worst gang in the world.”
Mr. Trump added: “We don’t like what Venezuela is sending us, whether it’s their drugs or whether it’s their gang members. We don’t like it. We don’t like it one bit.”
The president has repeatedly alleged that Tren de Aragua is headed by the President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. The U.S. intelligence community does not believe that assertion is accurate, according to a memorandum declassified in May.
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.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
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