Katie Miller, wife of senior Trump official Stephen Miller and struggling podcast host, made an appearance on CNN on Friday evening and tried, and failed, to defend the Trump administration’s strikes on boats off the coast of Venezuela.
The strikes, conducted as part of what President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have claimed is part of their crackdown on drug smuggling, have killed more than 80 people since they began in September.
As a guest on CNN’s Newsnight with Abby Phillip, Miller challenged her fellow panelist, attorney and former South Carolina Representative Bakari Sellers, to cite the statutes that suggest the president’s strikes were illegal.
“It‘s actually called the due process clause of the United States of America,” Sellers responded. ”Because can you point to one of those boats that actually had drugs on them? Do you know that? Do you know about the Trinidadians who were killed innocently, who were just fishermen? Can you actually kill those fishermen without due process?”
Families of two Trinidadian men have claimed their relatives were killed in one of the strikes conducted in October, although the Trinidadian government has maintained that there was no evidence they were on board. The family of a Colombian man is also seeking answers after their relative went missing following a September strike.
Secretary Hegseth is allegedly in the dark about the targets of these strikes and “does not know” who exactly is being killed by them, according to the New York Times. Rep. Jim Himes has said that the strikes are likely primarily killing low-level cartel members at best, and at worst, innocent fishermen.
The White House is seemingly aware of the risks of boat strikes in the area. Vice President JD Vance even made light of those risks at a rally in September, joking that he “wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the world.”
Undeterred, Miller offered Sellers a hypothetical, comparing the people aboard the boats to “members of al-Qaeda or ISIS coming to our shores with enough drugs or ammunition to kill 100,000 Americans.”
”Give me one name of one individual that you can compare to al-Qaeda coming through that had enough fentanyl to kill all these Americans. Can you name one?“ Sellers replied.
Unable to do so, Miller instead asked Sellers if he didn’t want the government to try something different to try and combat the entrance of illegal drugs into the country.
Sellers then returned to his original point, telling Miller, “I believe that individuals deserve some modicum of due process. I think that that is something that‘s enshrined in our constitution.”
Host Abby Phillip also weighed in, highlighting the fact that the administration has never explicitly stated which drugs are being transported on these boats—noting that fentanyl does not come from Venezuela—and that the issue is one of legality, about “what happens when there is a system that doesn‘t contemplate whether things are legal or not.”
The Trump administration has continued to ignore concerns around legality, even as allies have stopped sharing intel with the U.S. as a result of the strikes. As a new report was published regarding the kill order Defense Secretary Hegseth gave on the first boat, the self-styled Secretary of War posted on Friday, “We have only just begun to kill narco-terrorists.”
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