For the second time in two days, the Trump administration launched deadly strikes on a vessel suspected of smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific, expanding its campaign beyond the Caribbean Sea, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said late Wednesday.
The strikes this week were the eighth and ninth known boat attacks that U.S. Special Operations forces have conducted since the operation began in early September, and brought the officially acknowledged death toll to 37.
Mr. Hegseth did not provide geographic details beyond saying that the attacks had taken place in the eastern Pacific, in international waters. All of the previous seven attacks took place in the Caribbean. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, said the first strike in the eastern Pacific was off the coast of Colombia.
That strike, late Tuesday, killed two people on the boat, Mr. Hegseth said in a post on X that included video footage of the attack. He said the vessel was “known by our intelligence” to be involved in drug smuggling and was carrying narcotics. The defense secretary announced another on Wednesday evening, which he said was carried out that day and killed three people.
On Wednesday, speaking to reporters at the White House, President Trump bragged about the expanded action and suggested future strikes could go beyond targets at sea.
“They had one today in the Pacific, and the way I look at it — every time I look — because it is violent and it is very — it’s amazing, the weaponry, you know they have these boats that go 45 to 50 miles an hour in the water, and when you look at the accuracy and the power — look, we have the greatest military in the world,” he said.
Mr. Trump falsely asserted that each such destroyed boat saves 25,000 American lives. In reality, about 100,000 Americans die each year from drug overdoses, but most of those deaths are caused by fentanyl, which comes from labs in Mexico. South America produces cocaine.
Mr. Trump then suggested that he would soon order strikes against land targets, asserting that his administration’s strikes against boats had driven drug smuggling onto land routes. He added that his administration would “probably go back to Congress and explain exactly what we are doing” before launching those strikes, but insisted that he did not need their permission to act.
“We will hit them very hard when they come in by land,” Mr. Trump said of those his administration accuses of drug smuggling. “They haven’t experienced that yet, but now we are totally prepared to do that.”
The operation began on Sept. 2, when the military, on President Trump’s orders, began attacking boats believed to be smuggling drugs as if those aboard were enemy combatants in a war rather than criminal suspects.
Initially, the focus was on Venezuela. American officials are also weighing whether to intensify an effort to remove that nation’s president, Nicolás Maduro, who was indicted on drug trafficking charges in the United States in 2020 and whom the Trump team calls a cartel leader.
But in the interim, the boat attacks have increasingly extended to Colombia, which is a far greater source of narcotics smuggled to the United States than Venezuela. President Gustavo Petro of Colombia has said several strikes killed Colombians, and accused the United States of murder. Mr. Trump has said he was cutting off foreign aid to Colombia in response.
The administration has also said that intelligence backs its accusations of the passengers’ identities and what they were doing, but it has not offered evidence.
A broad range of outside experts in laws governing the use of armed force have said the campaign is illegal because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even criminal suspects — who are not directly participating in hostilities.
The White House has said the strikes are legal as a matter of self-defense and because Mr. Trump has “determined” that the country is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels that his team has deemed terrorists.
It has not publicly offered a legal theory that explains how to bridge the gap between trafficking an illicit product and responding with organized, armed attacks.
Much of the world’s supply of cocaine is produced by three countries in South America — especially Colombia, which has coastlines on both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
The Trump administration has said all of its attacks were in international waters. It also described the people aboard each vessel as members of groups designated as terrorist organizations. The administration itself bestowed that designation upon numerous Latin American drug cartels and criminal gangs in the months leading up to the campaign.
The legitimacy of that move is contested because drug cartels are motivated by the pursuit of illicit profits, while terrorists, by definition, are motivated by religious or ideological goals. In any case, the law allowing the executive branch to designate foreign groups as terrorists permits tactics like freezing assets, but it does not convey legal authority to kill their members.
U.S. officials on Wednesday did not immediately identify any specific group as the target of the latest strikes.
The majority of the cocaine smuggled into the United States moves through the Pacific, not the Caribbean, U.S. data shows. But the Trump administration has mostly focused its rhetoric on Venezuela, which only has a coast on the Caribbean. Mr. Trump described initial boat strikes as having killed Venezuelans and members of a Venezuelan gang.
But the strikes are causing larger turmoil in the region.
Mr. Petro of Colombia has said two strikes, one on Sept. 15 and one on Oct. 3, killed Colombians and accused the United States of murder. Relatives of a 26-year-old from Trinidad and Tobago said he and a neighbor had been killed in an Oct. 14 attack.
Citizens of Colombia and yet another country, Ecuador, survived an Oct. 16 strike on a semi-submersible vessel, which Mr. Trump later said had killed two people. The U.S. Navy rescued two survivors and the administration repatriated them, with Mr. Trump saying both would be detained and prosecuted.
However, prosecutors in Ecuador declined to charge that man, and instead released him on the grounds that there was no accusation he had committed a crime inside Ecuadorean territory.
“Who are we striking?” Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat on the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, asked on Wednesday at a security conference. “If these are narco-terrorists, as Secretary Hegseth reports, then why did we just repatriate two of them back to their country of origin, if they’re such bad guys?”
The other survivor has been hospitalized in Colombia with brain trauma and is breathing on a ventilator, Armando Benedetti, Colombia’s minister of the interior, said in a social media post on Saturday night. When he returns to consciousness, Mr. Benedetti said, he will be “processed by the justice system for drug trafficking.”
In the seventh strike, on Oct. 17, the military killed three men the Trump administration accused of smuggling drugs for a Marxist insurgent group in Colombia known as the National Liberation Army, or E.L.N., which the State Department designated as terrorist in 1997.
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.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.
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