How Murdering Suspected Drug Smugglers Became the New Normal

President Donald Trump was excited about a new military operation. "Earlier this morning," he announced on the afternoon of September 2, 2025, "U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility." That attack should "serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America," he said. "BEWARE! Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!!!!!!!!!"

Those 11 exclamation points might have seemed like overkill. But Trump was right that Americans should have been paying attention. His Truth Social post, which included a 29-second video clip showing a speedboat in the Caribbean Sea exploded by a missile, marked a radical and alarming shift in U.S. drug policy.

Historically, the Coast Guard had tried to stop seaborne drugs by intercepting suspected smugglers and searching their vessels. It would seize any contraband it discovered and arrest the crew members. The Coast Guard still does that. But Trump views that approach as insufficiently aggressive. Under his new policy, the U.S. military blows up vessels believed to be transporting cocaine, obliterating them along with their crews.

From Trump's perspective, the advantages of that strategy are clear. There is no need to confirm that any given boat is in fact carrying drugs, let alone prove that allegation in court. By treating criminal suspects as "unlawful combatants" in an "armed conflict" with the United States, Trump has managed to circumvent both due process and the constraints imposed by the law of war.

Interdiction "doesn't work," Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained the day after the first boat strike. "Instead of interdicting it, on the president's orders, we blew it up. And it'll happen again."

Rubio was right that it would happen again. As of late August 2026, U.S. forces had used missiles to destroy boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific 68 times under Trump's orders, remotely killing 227 people in cold blood without any semblance of due process.

With a few exceptions, we do not know who those people were, let alone what evidence the government might have had to implicate them in drug trafficking. But Trump assures us they were all "narcoterrorists" who richly deserved their fate, even though they would not have faced the death penalty under U.S. law and, judging from what happened to drug smugglers arrested around the same time, probably would not have been prosecuted at all if they had been lucky enough to be caught by the Coast Guard.

All of this, Trump insists, is perfectly legal and amazingly effective. Although there is ample reason to reject both of those claims, the president has been completely unfazed by objections from legal experts, drug policy specialists, and members of Congress.

A year after Trump launched his bloodthirsty antidrug campaign, the summary execution of alleged drug smugglers had become the new normal. By literalizing the war on drugs, Trump has flouted the law, undermined basic principles of justice, and perverted the mission of the U.S. military, erasing the traditional distinction between combatants and civilians.

Trump Doesn't Know Who He Is Killing

As Trump told it, the inaugural boat strike, which happened in international waters near the northeastern coast of Venezuela, killed "11 terrorists." How did he know they were terrorists? Because, he said, all 11 men had been "positively identified" as members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, "a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization" (FTO) implicated in "mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and [the] Western Hemisphere."

That account was fishy from the beginning. Tren de Aragua has been linked to a variety of crimes, including drug and weapon trafficking, prostitution, kidnapping, extortion, robbery, and migrant smuggling. The motivation for all those activities is financial profit, as opposed to political or religious ideology. Yet terrorism usually is defined as "the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government, with the goal of furthering political, social, or ideological objectives."

Trump was right that the State Department nevertheless had listed Tren de Aragua as a "foreign terrorist organization," consistent with his January 2025 executive order instructing the secretary of state to designate that gang and "certain international cartels" as FTOs. As of August, the State Department listed nearly 100 FTOs, 20 of which were Latin American groups that had been added since the beginning of Trump's second term. In addition to Tren de Aragua, they included drug-trafficking organizations such as the Ecuadorian gang Los Lobos, the transnational gang Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), and the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels.

While the Trump administration has specifically mentioned Tren de Aragua as the target of some boat strikes, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also has referred more generally to "designated terrorist organizations." Those designations are under the control of the executive branch, which can expand the list whenever it wants, although Congress theoretically can block a new listing if it acts within seven days.

More to the point, an FTO designation is not a license to kill alleged members of a listed group at will. Rather, it means that the Treasury Department can block transactions involving the group's assets and that the Justice Department can prosecute people for supplying it with "material support or resources."

Nor was it clear how the government had "positively identified" all 11 men on the boat as "Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists." The sheer number of people aboard the vessel, which was notably larger than the crews on other boats that were subsequently attacked, cast doubt on that claim.

As The Intercept's Nick Turse noted three days after the attack, an 11-man crew would be "unusually large" for a drug boat. "Why would 11 people be on board a boat carrying drugs?" an unnamed "government source" who "had attended a classified briefing" wondered in a June 2026 interview with Turse. "It's a high risk for the cartels. That always stood out." During a closed briefing on Capitol Hill, Turse reported, a "top military officer" had "stated that some of the people killed by the U.S. military may have been the victims of human trafficking."

That concession contradicted what Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson had said during a press briefing on December 2, 2025. Wilson insisted that "every single person who we have hit thus far" was "a narcoterrorist," saying "our intelligence has confirmed that, and we stand by it." Yet according to Rep. Sara Jacobs (D–Calif.), Turse noted, "Pentagon officials who briefed her admitted that the administration does not know the identities of all the individuals who were killed in the strikes."

Trump himself has joked about the potential for lethal errors. "I think anybody that saw that is going to say, 'I'll take a pass,'" he said after the first boat attack. "I don't even know about fishermen. They may say, 'I'm not getting on the boat. I'm not going to take a chance.'"

Turse highlighted another facet of the first boat attack that would later provoke congressional concern. Eight days after that operation, he reported that some of the people on the boat "survived an initial strike" and "were then killed shortly after in a follow-up attack." In late November 2025, The Washington Post confirmed that point and added new detail: After a missile tore apart the boat, killing nine people, "two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck." The Special Operations commander overseeing the operation, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, then "ordered a second strike," and "the two men were blown apart in the water."

On its face, that order looked like a war crime, and so did the decision to obey it. "Members of the armed forces must refuse to comply with clearly illegal orders to commit law of war violations," the Defense Department's law of war manual says. "For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal." That category includes "those in distress at sea," who are considered "shipwrecked" when they are "in need of assistance and care," assuming they "refrain from any hostile act."

During a closed-door congressional briefing on December 4, 2025, Bradley reportedly said the two survivors, who were struggling to stay afloat by holding onto an overturned section of the boat, were legitimate military targets because they might have attempted to salvage and deliver their cargo. That purported "threat" turned out to be purely speculative.

Military officials "told lawmakers they assumed the hull might be afloat because it still contained packs of cocaine," The New York Times reported. "They thought that the survivors might eventually have managed to float back to Venezuela, allowing them to try again to deliver that cocaine, or that another boat could come retrieve it." Although "they assumed the survivors could be communicating," classified video of the incident "did not show any radios or satellite phones," and "a surveillance plane apparently did not spot any nearby boat."

Bradley's explanation was good enough for Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.), who averred that the men in the water were "trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for [the] United States back over so they could stay in the fight." That assessment raises an obvious question: What fight?

An 'Armed Conflict' Without 'Hostilities'

Trump's boat strikes are aimed at people trying to supply drugs to Americans who want them. They are not aimed at people who have attacked the United States, have attempted to do so, or have any such plans. The violence in these operations is notably one-sided, limited to missiles fired by U.S. military personnel who are not in any danger and are not trying to stop an attack on anyone else.

Trump claims that violence nevertheless is justified under international law. According to the explanation that he offered Congress a month after the first attack, the United States is engaged in a "non-international armed conflict" with "nonstate armed groups" whose actions "constitute an armed attack against the United States."

As Rubio saw it, that declaration was enough to justify the use of lethal military force. "The United States is under attack from organized criminal narcoterrorists in our hemisphere, and the president is responding in the defense of our country," he said in November 2025. Accordingly, he declared two months later, "we continue to reserve the right to take strikes against drug boats that are bringing drugs towards the United States that are being operated by transnational criminal organizations."

Geoffrey Corn, formerly the U.S. Army's senior adviser on the law of war, did not buy it. "This is not stretching the envelope," he told The New York Times. "This is shredding it."

Under Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the International Committee of the Red Cross notes, a "non-international armed conflict" involves "hostilities" between a "non-state armed group" and another such group or a government. "Non-governmental groups involved in the conflict must be considered as 'parties to the conflict,' meaning that they possess organized armed forces," the Red Cross says. "The hostilities must reach a minimum level of intensity. This may be the case, for example, when the hostilities are of a collective character or when the government is obliged to use military force against the insurgents, instead of mere police forces."

The United Nations likewise says such conflicts involve "organised Parties" with "organised armed forces." The violence must surpass "a minimum threshold of intensity," meaning it is distinct from situations such as "riots," "banditry," "unorganized and short-lived insurrections," or "terrorist activities."

The "armed conflict" that Trump describes does not meet those criteria. Trump has implicitly admitted as much in trying to evade the requirements of the War Powers Resolution, which applies to the "introduction" or "continued use" of U.S. forces facing "hostilities" or "situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances."

The boat strikes do not qualify as "hostilities," the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel told Congress last fall, because U.S. forces do not face a plausible threat of casualties. That position underlines the one-sided nature of the violence. It also belies Trump's legal justification for that violence, since a "non-international armed conflict" without "hostilities" is a contradiction in terms, especially when the enemy supposedly is engaged in "an armed attack against the United States."

In addition to a legal rationale that does not pass the laugh test, Trump has offered a moral justification that makes no sense. Drug traffickers have "wrought devastating consequences on American communities for decades, causing the deaths of tens of thousands of United States citizens each year," he said in a letter to Congress two days after the first strike. "We have now reached a critical point where we must meet this threat to our citizens and our most vital national interests with United States military force in self-defense." The boat strikes aim to stop drug traffickers from "murdering more Americans," White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly claimed a month later.

Hegseth and Vice President J.D. Vance offered similar rationales. "Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military," Vance declared on X in September 2025. "These highly effective strikes are specifically intended to be 'lethal, kinetic strikes,'" Hegseth said on X a couple of months later. "The declared intent is to stop lethal drugs, destroy narco-boats and kill the narco-terrorists who are poisoning the American people."

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin likewise thinks summary execution is an appropriate penalty for smuggling cocaine. "I have zero problems with sending them to the bottom of the ocean," he told reporters in December 2025, when he was still an Oklahoma senator. "I hope they rot in hell for it because they know what they're doing when they get on that boat and they're trafficking the drugs to our streets."

Because Americans sometimes die after consuming illegal drugs, in other words, killing people suspected of supplying those drugs is a perfectly justified act of self-defense and retribution. By the same logic, the government also would be justified in killing suppliers of alcohol, a drug that is implicated in something like 178,000 U.S. deaths each year.

U.S. law does not agree with Trump, Vance, Hegseth, and Mullin. Although Trump has repeatedly advocated expanded use of the death penalty for drug offenders, that punishment is not an option for smugglers like the ones he is targeting, even when they are arrested, tried, and convicted.

In fact, the Justice Department frequently views the crimes of such low-level operatives as so minor that prosecuting them is more trouble than it's worth. During the first three months of boat strikes, the U.S. military blew up 22 vessels, killing 83 people. During the same period, The New York Times reports, "the Coast Guard interdicted 38 vessels suspected of smuggling drugs." By and large, those smugglers were returned to their home countries because the Justice Department declined to prosecute them. Trump nevertheless maintains that people suspected of the same conduct deserve death.

If a police officer decided to kill a suspected drug dealer instead of taking him into custody, he would be guilty of murder. The same goes for killing alleged drug smugglers when they pose no imminent threat of violence. Under 18 USC 1111, murder is defined as "the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought" within "the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States." That jurisdiction includes "the high seas" and "any vessel belonging in whole or in part to the United States or any citizen thereof." And under 18 USC 956, anyone "within the jurisdiction of the United States" is guilty of a felony when he conspires to "commit at any place outside the United States an act that would constitute the offense of murder."

The Uniform Code of Military Justice likewise defines murder as the unlawful, premeditated killing of a human being. That includes the deliberate killing of noncombatants. And suspected drug smugglers clearly fall into that category, unless you accept Trump's assertion of a nonexistent "armed conflict."

If the United States were in fact engaged in a "non-international armed conflict," a group of former military lawyers said in November 2025, a policy of killing everyone aboard each boat would be "clearly illegal under international law." And if there is no such conflict, the Former JAGs Working Group added, "orders to kill helpless civilians clinging to the wreckage of a vessel our military destroyed would subject everyone from [the defense secretary] down to the individual who pulled the trigger to prosecution under U.S. law for murder."

The Campaign Has Not Worked as Advertised

To support his portrayal of murder as self-defense, Trump has made extravagant claims about the benefits of blowing up suspected drug boats. "Every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives," Trump averred during an Oval Office press conference in October 2025. "Every boat is saving 25,000 lives. The boats get hit, and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean."

Trump has reiterated that claim, and so have his underlings. "Every single boat that we strike saves 25,000 American lives," Wilson, the Pentagon spokeswoman, asserted at the same briefing in which she insisted that everyone killed by the strikes had been conclusively identified as a "narcoterrorist."

As of August 2026, that estimate implies, the boat strikes had prevented about 1.7 million U.S. drug deaths—24 times the number recorded in 2025. Although the math underlying that impossible claim remains mysterious, it seems to derive from several mistaken assumptions.

First, Trump assumes the targeted boats were heading to the United States, although much of the cocaine transported by sea is destined for Europe. Second, Trump conflates cocaine, the main drug transported over the sea routes he has been targeting, with fentanyl, which figures in many more drug deaths but is typically smuggled in small packages by land over the southern border. Third, Trump assumes that any given amount of drugs would be evenly divided into lethal doses, each of which would be consumed in one sitting by a different person. Fourth, he imagines, contrary to more than a century of experience with drug interdiction, that traffickers do not compensate for intercepted shipments by sending more. When drugs are seized or destroyed, he thinks, the total supply available to Americans is reduced by that amount.

Trump himself has implicitly contradicted that last premise by declaring that the traditional approach to drug interdiction, which involved seizing drugs and later destroying them rather than incinerating them on the spot, was "totally ineffective." But either way, the drugs are taken out of circulation. If the old strategy did not have a meaningful impact on the drug supply, it is hard to see why the new one would—unless the threat of death is scary enough to substantially reduce smuggling.

Trump has implied as much from the beginning, saying his policy would deter "anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America." That has not proven to be the case, which is not surprising, given how lucrative prohibition has made drug trafficking and the many ways smugglers can avoid ending up on the wrong end of an American missile.

Thanks to his "quick and brutal" strategy, Trump bragged on Truth Social last April, "98.2% of Drugs coming into the U.S. by Ocean or Sea have STOPPED!" That number resembled estimates he had previously offered. Like his claim that each boat attack had saved 25,000 lives, it was hard to verify.

The White House cited numbers indicating that air and marine seizures of drugs by U.S. Customs and Border Protection had dropped by 98 percent from July 2025 to November 2025. But it was not clear whether that decrease reflected reduced shipments or successful evasion. And as PolitiFact noted, marijuana accounted for most of the change. By contrast, the Coast Guard, which "oversees most drug seizures on water" and "generally focuses on cocaine," reported a 200 percent spike in fiscal year 2025 (which overlapped with the first month of the boat strikes) compared to the average for prior years.

Whatever you make of those numbers, it soon became clear that "blowing up boats hasn't slowed cocaine traffic" to the United States, as The New York Times noted in late May, nearly nine months after Trump started his "quick and brutal" military campaign.

If Trump were putting a significant dent in the cocaine supply (or, more plausibly, imposing new costs that traffickers felt compelled to recoup by charging more), you would expect retail prices to rise. But according to University of North Carolina drug researcher Nabarun Dasgupta, the Times said, "street prices for cocaine" in "many U.S. cities" remained "about where they were before the boat strikes began."

Pressure from the boat strikes might also be reflected in adulteration of cocaine with cheaper substances such as levamisole and lidocaine. But Dasgupta reported that adulteration rates in 2026 were, if anything, a bit lower than in 2025.

A reduced supply of cocaine also should be reflected in the substances detected after drug-related deaths. According to provisional estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, however, deaths involving cocaine fell slightly in early 2025 but remained flat during the six months after the boat strikes began.

Although Trump's strategy has not affected the amount of cocaine available in the United States, it does seem to have driven changes in smuggling patterns. According to the experts consulted by the Times, traffickers had shifted from the small speedboats targeted by Trump to overland routes through Central America and shipments concealed in cargo on larger vessels.

The Washington Post reached similar conclusions in July. "The Trump administration's deadly military strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats have not reduced the amount of cocaine entering the United States," it reported, citing Pentagon officials who "told lawmakers the strikes in international waters off South and Central America had not reduced [cocaine's] purity."

According to an assessment by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Post said, the strikes had "failed to affect the supply or price of cocaine in the United States" but "had led traffickers to diversify beyond go-fast boats and to avoid international waters, opting instead for larger boats and hemming close to coastlines, where U.S. forces are less likely to open fire." Traffickers also were "relying more on aircraft, which take off from clandestine airstrips along the Colombian-Venezuelan border and head east to Guyana and Suriname to avoid U.S. forces."

An unnamed DEA official quoted by the Post invoked a hoary analogy familiar to drug policy analysts. "When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other side," he said. "They always find the weak spots and exploit them."

That general pattern was apparent by March, when Sen. Mark Kelly (D–Ariz.) questioned whether drug trafficking had been measurably affected by the boat strikes. "These operations raise serious concerns about effectiveness," he said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Kelly asked Gen. Francis L. Donovan, who oversees the boat strikes as head of U.S. Southern Command, "what evidence" he had that "this campaign is actually degrading cartel operations rather than simply destroying some low-level assets," "killing some people," and "displacing some trafficking routes."

Donovan candidly admitted that "I couldn't provide you [with] measures of effectiveness for the current effort." Although "we've seen changes in the narco-traffickers' patterns," he said, "the boat strikes aren't the answer."

'Where Is the Legality Here?'

Kelly, a former U.S. Navy pilot, also has questioned the legal basis for the campaign. "Where is the legality here?" he wondered in September 2025. There is "a legal way," he said, "to take out drug dealers from being able to deliver drugs into the United States." After a briefing that October, Kelly said the Pentagon and the White House "could not give us a logical explanation on how this is legal," adding that "they were tying themselves in knots trying to explain this."

A month later, Kelly described the legal rationale for the boat strikes as "questionable at best." But he declined to say whether orders to attack the boats were generally unlawful, drawing a distinction between an "initial strike" and a "second strike" like the one that killed survivors of the inaugural operation. When asked whether a follow-up assault like that would constitute "a war crime," he replied that "it seems to."

In an August 2026 letter to Trump, Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Va.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said his review of classified material related to the strikes showed they have extended "far beyond" people whom the Justice Department had claimed "could be lawfully targeted." In other words, Kaine said, "the United States has killed individuals who are not involved in narcotrafficking," whom he described as "murder victims."

Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) has been clearer in categorically condemning the boat strikes, emphasizing the lack of anything resembling due process. When the Coast Guard stops vessels suspected of carrying drugs, Paul noted in October 2025, it finds no contraband roughly a quarter of the time. The implication, he said, was that the government was likely to blow up boats even when they had no drugs aboard. He added that "Congress must not allow the executive branch to become judge, jury, and executioner."

Even law professor John Yoo, who defended "enhanced interrogation methods" as a Justice Department lawyer under President George W. Bush, was troubled by Trump's novel use of the military. "These attacks risk crossing the line between crime-fighting and war," he wrote in a September 2025 Washington Post essay. While acknowledging the harm caused by illegal drugs, he emphasized that "the U.S. cannot wage war against any source of harm to Americans."

The Trump administration's explanation to Congress "doesn't really answer the questions that would allow us to decide whether this is an appropriate use of force," Yoo added in a CNN interview the following month. "The United States can't wage war constitutionally, I think, or legally, against criminal groups."

Yet it has waged such a war, albeit neither legally nor constitutionally. Will that practice go by the boards under future presidents, or will it persist as a routine tool of drug law enforcement? Possibly the latter, assuming that Trump is succeeded by someone like Vance, Rubio, or Cotton, all of whom have applauded his boat strikes.

Even if the Republican presidential nominee wins in 2028, says Jonathan Caulkins, a drug policy expert at Carnegie Mellon University, he "ought to reverse this policy," since "it carries a high cost in terms of national reputation relative to its practical benefits." Although "the MAGA faithful" might "revolt" at such a reversal, Caulkins writes in an email, "most Republicans, even most conservative Republicans, believe in the idea that no person is above the law," and "Trump is really quite odd" in rejecting that principle.

Ethan Nadelmann, founder and former executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, has a similar take. "The violent drama of the strikes appealed to [Trump's] political base," he says in an email. "And I see it as part and parcel of Trump's view that laws—both U.S. and international—do not apply to him."

While "Trump may be setting a precedent for any Republican presidents that follow in his footsteps," Nadelmann says, "I'd be surprised if Democratic successors followed it." Still, he says, "the fact that the military campaign against suspected drug boats had no impact on the flow of cocaine is at best a minor variable," since "both Democrats and Republicans have stubbornly spent many billions on interdiction campaigns over many decades notwithstanding abundant evidence that doing so has virtually no impact on illicit drug use or markets in the U.S."

Douglas Berman, executive director of the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at The Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law, likewise thinks the staying power of Trump's innovation may depend on which party wins the next presidential election. In light of "the grief given to Trump and what seems to be a relative lack of efficacy," a Democratic president is unlikely to copy his approach, Berman says in an email. But "I presume future GOP folks will not be against these strikes in principle," he adds, and a future president "can certainly cite the drug boat precedent if he wants to use military authority to go after cartels or other drug 'bogeymen.'"

Although the boat strikes "have shifted the drug enforcement Overton window," Berman says, "I am not expecting these kinds of efforts to be par for the course absent reason to believe it achieves something meaningful." But such tactics might become "the new normal," he suggests, if Republicans can convince people that the military campaign has contributed to recent declines in drug deaths.

Eric Trump, the president's son, took a stab at that in January, when he urged his father to "keep blowing the shit out of those boats," citing a sharp decline in fentanyl-related deaths. Inconveniently for both Trumps, that drop happened during the Biden administration. In any event, it was hard to see how blowing up boats carrying cocaine could plausibly reduce deaths involving fentanyl.

The current president is clearly unfazed by such logical difficulties, and he is equally oblivious to the moral and legal issues raised by his murderous antidrug crusade. Whether future presidents follow his lead may depend on whether voters care one way or the other.

The post How Murdering Suspected Drug Smugglers Became the New Normal appeared first on Reason Magazine.