“Please be warned that we will blow you out of existence,” President Donald Trump said during his speech at the United Nations on Tuesday, issuing a politely phrased mortal threat to would-be drug traffickers. Already, the administration has killed 17 people—“narco-terrorists,” Trump calls them—in air strikes on three boats allegedly from Venezuela and loaded with what the president has described as “big bags of cocaine and fentanyl.”
Trump and his aides have justified the extrajudicial killings as a decisive measure to protect Americans from dangerous drugs, especially fentanyl, the synthetic opioid behind the worst overdose epidemic in U.S. history, which accelerated during his first term in office.
“We have no choice,” Trump told the United Nations General Assembly. “Each boat that we sink carries drugs that would kill more than 25,000 Americans.”
But here’s the thing: Although the United States Coast Guard interdicts staggering quantities of illegal drugs in the Caribbean each year, it does not encounter fentanyl on the high seas. South American cocaine and marijuana account for the overwhelming majority of maritime seizures, according to Coast Guard data, and there isn’t a single instance of a fentanyl seizure—let alone “bags” of the drug—in the agency’s press releases.
Last month, the U.S. cutter Hamilton returned to Florida with what the agency called “the largest quantity of drugs offloaded in Coast Guard history”: 61,740 pounds of cocaine and 14,400 pounds of marijuana (that’s the weight of about three city buses). The haul, gathered by multiple federal agencies during 19 seizure incidents in the Caribbean as well as the Pacific, had an estimated street value of $473 million. But there wasn’t any fentanyl on the boat.
Steve Roth, a Coast Guard lieutenant commander and spokesperson for the agency, wrote to me that Coast Guard crews confiscated a “historic amount of cocaine” during the 2025 fiscal year that ends this month, but no fentanyl. He offered a bank-shot rationale for Trump’s claims, arguing that other illegal drugs, such as cocaine, generate profits that “fuel and enable Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Transnational Criminal Organizations to produce and traffic illegal fentanyl threatening the U.S.”
Trump has spoken in personal terms about the devastating toll of the fentanyl crisis, and has long tied it to his efforts to fortify the southern border and crack down on immigration. Anne Fundner, the mother of a 15-year-old who overdosed from a fentanyl-laced pill, gave an emotional speech at the Republican National Convention last year, blaming her son’s death on the Biden administration’s border policies. Trump pledged to make ending the fentanyl crisis a top priority for his administration, and has cast the drug as an insidious foreign tool devised to undermine American greatness. He now invokes it as a fact-free way to justify policies with little or minimal nexus to the drug trade.
The president cited fentanyl production when he imposed tariffs on Canada, even though fewer than 0.2 percent of fentanyl seizures by U.S. Customs and Border Protection occurred along the northern border. Trump has cited fentanyl trafficking to push for hundreds of additional miles of barriers across deserts and mountains along the Mexico border, in spite of CBP data that shows that more than 90 percent of U.S. seizures of the drug occur at the official crossings, or ports of entry, where couriers hide the drug in body cavities or inside vehicles.
In his second term, Trump has taken what was once a right-wing talking point—treating smuggling organizations as terrorist groups rather than criminal syndicates—to create an emergency justification for the use of lethal force. If the U.S. military can kill terror suspects plotting to blow up Americans, then it can also use lethal force on smugglers trying to poison them with drugs, this thinking goes. But the administration has not said what specific legal authority it is using to kill trafficking suspects with no due process, aside from loosely claiming that the United States is “at war.”
“I think the rules of engagement should be similar to what they are in war, because we are, in fact, in a war against these drug cartels,” Vice President J. D. Vance, who has written about his mother’s struggles with opioid addiction, told reporters in response to criticism of the strikes.
This month, as his administration positions a naval flotilla in the southern Caribbean and hints at an attack on Venezuela, Trump has slipped fentanyl references into his public statements without any evidence that the drug is coming from South America. U.S. authorities have not said what type of drugs, if any, have been recovered from the boats hit by U.S. munitions, although officials in the Dominican Republic said that they found cocaine amid the wreckage of the boat struck last week 80 miles south of its territory.
Although cocaine is a potentially lethal drug, it is far less deadly than fentanyl. Colombia, not Venezuela, is the world’s leading producer of cocaine, and traffickers with speedboats have been smuggling it through the Caribbean for decades. It has been the policy of the United States and its partner nations in the region to seize the drugs and prosecute suspected traffickers, not kill them.
Adam Isacson, a security analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, told me that he monitors press releases from the Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Southern Command, the Coast Guard, CBP, and researchers who study the drug trade. He told me that he has never seen a mention of fentanyl.
“It’s the drug that is impacting Americans the most, so you can see why Trump would invoke it to try to justify building walls, imposing punishing tariffs, or unlawfully using lethal force in the Caribbean,” he told me. “But there’s just no evidence to back up using fentanyl as a pretext.”
Most of the deadly fentanyl that has flooded into the United States over the past decade is produced in clandestine labs by criminal groups in Northern Mexico, according to the DEA and DHS. They operate in Mexican cities and states near the U.S. border, and the chemists who manufacture the drug smuggle the ingredients they need primarily from Asia.
Fentanyl killed roughly 48,000 Americans last year, down from approximately 76,000 in 2023, according to CDC estimates. Overall U.S. overdose deaths have been declining since 2023; there were roughly 80,000 last year. (Trump, in his UN speech, falsely claimed that 300,000 Americans were killed by drugs last year.)
Some analysts say the Caribbean strikes could be a prelude to a broader campaign aimed at toppling the Venezuelan ruler Nicolás Maduro. But the strikes may have another purpose: They may be a test run for unilateral U.S. strikes on suspected cartel targets in Mexico. The Washington Post reported last week that DEA officials have urged such strikes but that the White House has not agreed. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has long said that such a move would violate Mexican sovereignty if not carried out in coordination with Mexican authorities.
John Feeley, a former U.S. ambassador to Panama and U.S. Marine Corps helicopter pilot, wrote to me that the large U.S. flotilla sent to the Caribbean “is not remotely fit to a maritime counternarcotics task” and appears to be designed to “scare Maduro” while serving as a training ground for potential operations in Mexico, “where the drug menace in the form of fentanyl is real.”
But Trump and his top aides are “on thin legal ice” when they equate drug trafficking to terrorism, Feeley said, calling it “old turf with lots of jurisprudence” that has tripped up lawmakers and the executive branch for decades.
“There’s a reason no previous administration didn’t just start shwacking suspected druggies,” said Feeley, who was the second-ranking U.S. diplomat in Mexico during the most intense phase of U.S. involvement in the fight against the country’s drug cartels during the early 2010s. “These guys have been laying out the fucking banana peels for themselves here.”
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