Escalating the Drug War: Trump’s Attacks On Civilian Boats
Since September 2nd of this year, the United States government has been waging a war against civilian boats in Latin American waters, alleged by Trump Administration officials to be transporting illegal drugs. The strikes, initially limited to Venezuelan boats off the country’s coast in the Caribbean Sea, have since expanded in scope. As of November 16, there have been 22 known strikes on alleged drug boats, which have killed 87 people. At least three of the strikes have taken place in the Pacific Ocean, targeting Colombian boats, including one yesterday.
Within days after President Trump posted a video of the first strike on Truth Social, officials in his administration had closed ranks, defending the strike as a legitimate act of warfare. Secretary of State Marco Rubio doubled down, saying: “Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up. And it will happen again.”
The United Nations says it considers these strikes a violation of international law. And this past weekend, after reports of a follow-up strike targeting survivors of the first attack emerged, lawmakers both Democratic and Republican joined the chorus of condemnations, arguing that the law of armed conflict prohibits the execution of enemy combatants who are injured or have surrendered.
Virginia Democrat Sen. Tim Kaine told CBS that the attack “rises to the level of a war crime if it’s true.” Rep. Mike Turner, a Republican from Ohio who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, said the follow-up strike was “completely outside of anything that has been discussed with Congress. “Obviously, if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, a former Navy fighter pilot who drew heat from the Trump administration after taking part in a video reminding service members of their duty to disobey illegal orders, said the follow-up strike is probably a war crime.
The White House said Monday that Admiral Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley, commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, ordered the second strike. According to press secretary Karoline Leavitt, the strike was “well within his authority” and “conducted in self-defense to protect Americans” in accordance with the law of armed conflict.
It’s certainly possible that the White House is setting Bradley up to take the fall if public backlash becomes too strong. But for now, officials in the Trump Administration remain unequivocal in their support for these attacks. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he watched the operation live on video and that Bradley “made the right call.” According to the New York Times, President Trump praised Admiral Bradley and said Tuesday that the U.S. would “start doing strikes on land, too” and that the strikes may not be limited to Venezuela. They quoted the president as saying that anyone manufacturing drugs or “selling it into our country” is also subject to attack.
In addition to conducting attacks on civilian boats without evidence of a crime, the U.S. military has massively increased its presence in the Caribbean. In September, fighter jets were deployed to Puerto Rico, and Navy ships have been stationed off the coasts of Cuba and Venezuela. On October 24th, the Pentagon announced that the largest aircraft carrier in the world would be deployed off the coast of Venezuela, and multiple administration officials confirmed to CNN that Trump is considering strikes on alleged cocaine production facilities and trafficking routes within Venezuela. Meanwhile, his administration has placed sanctions on Colombian President Gustavo Petro, his family, and his inner circle, referring to the president as an “illegal drug leader” and arguing that under his watch, he has allowed drug trafficking to flourish.
It is not new for the U.S. military to act with impunity. It is not new for the U.S.to violate international law or brazenly commit war crimes. And it is also not new for the executive branch of the U.S. government to use terrorism as an excuse to perform acts of violence without approval by Congress, which has the sole power to declare war under the U.S. Constitution. These attacks represent a continuation of the Bush-era War on Terror and erosion of our Constitution. But they also bolster a uniquely fascist agenda that Trump has been pushing since his re-election. In manufacturing this war in Latin America, the Trump Administration is also paving the way for the civil liberties of drug dealers, suspected drug dealers, and even suspected drug users to be stripped away.
The Drug War as a Pretext
Make no mistake, the primary goal of this belligerent warmongering is to seize Venezuelan resources, most notably their vast, state-controlled oil reserves. This is not the first time Trump has attempted to link Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to narcoterrorism. In 2020, during the first Trump Administration, a grand jury indicted Maduro on charges of narcoterrorism and cocaine trafficking, which Trump then used to advocate for regime change and the toppling of the Maduro government.
It certainly is true that there is rampant corruption in Venezuela, as well as substantial democratic backsliding. The Venezuelan opposition leader and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize recipient is currently living in hiding and is an outspoken supporter of Trump’s hawkish policies.
But the country is not a major exporter of drugs. The Trump Administration wants Maduro gone primarily because his leftist government is a stumbling block to American regional hegemony.
Maduro is the successor to the widely popular socialist leader Hugo Chavez. Under Chavez’s “Bolivarian revolution,” oil wealth was redistributed into social programs like low-income housing and public education, and the poverty rate was nearly cut in half between 2002 and 2011. Maduro, thanks to a combination of political corruption and crippling U.S.-led sanctions, has overseen a collapse in both the country’s economy and his own approval rating. As such, hawks in the U.S. government see Venezuela as the perfect candidate for regime change.
And what about Colombia? While the country does not have the same degree of untapped oil wealth as Venezuela, no world leader has been more vocally anti-Trump (and anti-Israel) than Colombia’s socialist President Gustavo Petro. In recent months, he has compared Trump’s ICE raids to the early years of the holocaust and has called for the formation of a liberation army to take military action to protect Palestinians. For a world leader, he has also been unusually plain spoken in opposing drug prohibition, saying earlier this year that cocaine is “no worse than whiskey” and that drug trafficking organizations could be dismantled if cocaine were legalized worldwide.
An Excuse For Deportations
Trump’s warmongering in Latin America represents not just a resource grab, but a means of fulfilling his domestic agenda. Venezuelan migrants, many of whom fled their country in the last 10 years as the economy fell apart, are an easy target for the Trump Administration, whose keystone agenda item has been a campaign of mass deportations. There are almost a million Venezuelan immigrants in the U.S. Only 25% are American citizens; many are undocumented, while many others have claimed asylum and are attempting to become lawful permanent residents. While the administration and right-wing media have not spent nearly as much time attacking Colombian migrants, this may soon change. As of the most recent census in 2021, 1 in 4 Latin American immigrants to the U.S. are Colombian.
In order to justify these sweeping deportations and total lack of due process, Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act, an obscure 18th-century law giving the president the authority to detain or deport citizens of an enemy country. The problem? Neither Venezuela nor Colombia is officially an enemy. In order to have the legal authority to continue to deport alleged drug traffickers without due process, the Trump Administration must be able to claim that civilian drug smugglers are actually enemy combatants.
At just the third Pentagon press briefing held December 2nd at the U.S. Department of War – boycotted by mainstream media due to reporting restrictions – disgraced congressman Matt Gaetz asked press secretary Kingsley Wilson if anyone who served in the Venezuelan military would be considered a narco-terrorist. She replied, “That would be a determination for the President to make.”
The Narcoterrorism Designation
In using the word “narcoterrorist” to describe victims of boat strikes and Venezuelans as a whole, the Trump White House is intentionally linking our War on Drugs with our War on Terror. Trump’s White House has been circulating draft legislation that would give him the authority to kill anyone he deems to be a narcoterrorist, and the president could use this logic to broaden the scope of the administration’s crackdown on its perceived enemies and further erode the First Amendment.
This is hardly speculative; earlier this year, ICE used terrorism as a justification to abduct a series of student protestors whose only “crime” was criticism of what the United Nations has asserted is Israeli genocide in Gaza. Two of the highest-profile examples are Mahmoud Khalil, who had been involved in organizing the Columbia University pro-Palestine protests, and Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts PhD student who had written an op-ed calling for divestment from Israel. In both cases, the Department of Homeland Security justified its detention by saying that they indicated support for Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.
Neither Khalil nor Ozturk actually expressed support for Hamas. Their position – that Israel is committing genocide – is the position held by major human rights organizations like Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and Human Rights Watch. But that did not matter to the DHS. If writing an op-ed critical of Israel is seen by the Trump administration as material support for terrorism, then what will come of designating a Venezuelan drug cartel as a terrorist organization and sanctioning the Colombian president for supporting narcoterrorism?
The answer, unfortunately, is that this could give Trump the same domestic impunity that his administration is currently enjoying internationally. Right now, Trump is purging the military of its checks and balances. Any officer who wishes to disobey an unlawful order must now defend their decisions in military courts that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has stacked with Trump loyalists.
This is the same military that has been deployed to major American cities to advance the president’s domestic agenda. I am deeply concerned that going to war with loosely defined foreign drug cartels will give the president justification to dish out similar violence to his domestic enemies. If military officers of conscience want to challenge a command to take violent action against American citizens, they will have to do so through a legal system of Trump and Hegseth’s own making.
If drug traffickers are terrorists and enemies of the state, then the Trump Administration could make the argument that everyone in the supply chain, all the way down to suspected small-time users, is providing material and financial support to terrorism. Trump and his allies are already attempting to denaturalize American citizens like New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani through baseless accusations that he is a supporter of terrorism. Will they do this to American citizens who are suspected of being drug users? Or will they skip deportation, take a page from Trump’s favorite strongman, Rodrigo Duterte, and extrajudicially assassinate them instead?
The drug boat strikes have already impacted national security, prompting the suspension of intelligence sharing by the UK as well as the departure of a U.S. Navy admiral who had legal concerns about the attacks. Meanwhile, Trump just pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the right-wing former President of Honduras who was convicted of importing large amounts of cocaine into the U.S. and sentenced to 45 years in prison.
A Dishonest Invocation of Health and Safety
Trump claims that each alleged drug boat that is bombed will save 25,000 American lives. This is false. Bombing a small Venezuelan speedboat that may or may not have contained a few drug smugglers will do absolutely nothing to keep Americans safe from the drugs they might have been carrying. But this grotesque escalation in the War on Drugs, and the intentional effort to link it to the War on Terror, is merely the logical endpoint to decades of drug policies that have never had the safety of drug users, or Americans at large, as their main concern.
We live in an era where there is widespread awareness of the ravages of the opioid epidemic. Overdose deaths, despite having declined from their 2022 peak, remain high; in 2024, more than 80,000 Americans died of drug overdoses. Fentanyl is now widely known to have contaminated the supply of most street drugs. People have a real, understandable fear of drugs, often borne out of first-hand loss of loved ones.
But the majority of American overdose deaths are caused by fentanyl, according to the DEA, and if the targeted boats are carrying drugs at all, it is almost certainly cocaine. The majority of the fentanyl that enters the American drug supply is made in Mexico with precursor chemicals from China; neither Venezuela nor Colombia is central to this market. Increasingly, many Americans blame domestic malfeasance for the overdose crisis more than they blame foreign traffickers. The Sacklers and their company, Purdue Pharma, for example, are now household names after being successfully sued for pushing doctors to prescribe OxyContin and lying about its addiction potential. More so than ever, Americans understand that our decades-long war on drugs has neither reduced the supply nor the demand for mind-altering substances, and has only made the supply of those substances less safe.
But Trump is not a true populist; he has never been beholden to his constituents but rather his donors, which include police unions, private prisons, and the military-industrial complex, all of whom benefit greatly from a continuation of the war on drugs, both domestic and foreign. He has also given sweetheart deals to data companies like Palantir that are financially invested in a mass deportation policy, as part of the rapidly growing deportation-industrial complex. The Trump Administration and its media enablers want to take this rage at powerful American elites and redirect it. By linking the War on Drugs to the War on Terror, Trump is attempting to reframe drug dealing as not merely a crime, but an act of war.
Meanwhile, in Portland, Oregon
This erosion of civil liberties, and Trump’s deployment of military force against the so-called “enemy within,” is personal to me, and not just because I am capable of empathy. In Trump’s vision of reality, the U.S. is not merely at war with Venezuela (and potentially Colombia, if current trends hold), but my home city of Portland, Oregon as well.
I am lucky, as a white American citizen born on U.S. soil, not to be the primary target of Trump’s aspirational fascism. But I am also a proud leftist and drug journalist who has made my feelings about this administration more than clear. I would be lying if I said I was not concerned for myself and my family every time I hear Trump fantasizing about militarizing the streets of a city he knows nothing about. While I am heartened to see the courts repeatedly block his administration from deploying the National Guard to our streets, I also remain acutely aware that his entire political project is to create a military that can enact his agenda, both foreign and domestic, with no accountability to any court that would challenge its power.
Where to go from here
These strikes against alleged drug smuggling boats are just another example of the Trump administration seeing what they can get away with. It is an attempt to wield our xenophobia and ignorance to push an agenda that will revitalize the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. The Trump Administration and its lackeys will try to build support for their war, and the erosion of domestic civil liberties, by continuing to stoke this paranoia and fear.
Our nominally left-wing party must be honest and recognize that none of the Trump administration’s actions are taken in good faith. Many Democrats continue to support our extensive sanctions on Venezuela, in spite of ample evidence that these sanctions have crippled the country’s economy and led to the wave of mass migration that Trump is using to fuel his own agenda. At a domestic level, many Democrats continue to spend more time admonishing the left than fighting Trump’s aspirational fascism. As an example, Florida Rep. Brian Mast recently introduced a bill, with the widespread support of his Republican colleagues, that would give Secretary of State Marco Rubio the authority to revoke the passports of U.S. citizens who have protested against Israel. Despite this, the Democratic Party still includes prominent members like Senator John Fetterman, who has spent more time criticizing these protestors than the Republican-led assault on their constitutional rights, and has come out in support of the Trump Administration’s strikes on these civilian boats.
If the Trump administration really wanted to deal with the overdose crisis in America, it would end the billions of dollars spent on our War on Drugs and spend that money instead on education, rehabilitation, and the creation of a safe and regulated supply for the tens of millions of Americans who use drugs. The best way to put a cartel out of business is to create a legal alternative; most people do not want to break the law if they don’t have to. But for all the attention given to JD Vance’s backstory about his mother’s drug addiction, the administration’s priority is not, nor has it ever been, ending the overdose crisis.
Unless the American people and the Democratic Party stand in clear-eyed opposition to this blatantly false pretense for Trump’s politically convenient war, Rubio will continue to invoke the specter of narcoterrorism, and the Trump regime will likely continue these attacks until he is able to provoke a military retaliation. If this happens, we will once again be fighting a senseless war that could have easily been avoided.
Main Image: US Marines conduct live fire drills aboard U.S. Navy ship USS Iwo Jima in the Caribbean Sea, September 2025. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Tanner Bernat.