Somewhere mingled in the foam and debris of the Caribbean Sea are the remains of at least 17 people who were killed this month by U.S. military forces on the orders of President Trump. They were aboard three speedboats that the Trump administration said were carrying drugs and smugglers from Venezuela.
Perhaps they were. Yet the administration has produced no evidence for its claims. And even if the allegations are correct, blowing up the boats is a lawless exercise in the use of deadly force.
On social media, Mr. Trump assured the public that the passengers were not only drug traffickers but also “narcoterrorists” and members of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang, which he said was under the control of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. Military force was justified as a form of self-defense, he said, because the cartels are “threatening our national security,” and his top aides have vowed to continue the strikes. The self-defense justification looks especially weak after The Times reported that the first of the three boats turned away from the United States before being destroyed.
With these attacks, Mr. Trump has ordered the summary execution of people who are not at war with the United States in any traditional sense of the term and who may not even have been committing the crime of which he accused them. It is a violation of legal due process that should alarm all Americans. It is even more extreme than his policy of sending migrants to a brutal prison in El Salvador, based on questionable claims that they belonged to Tren de Aragua and without any chance to contest the government’s claims. The United States, created in opposition to monarchy, should never become a country where the president can order the indefinite imprisonment or the unilateral killing of people merely because he has deemed them to be criminals.
Drug trafficking is a serious problem, with synthetic opioids such as fentanyl having killed more than 800,000 Americans in the 21st century. It would certainly be reasonable for the Trump administration to increase enforcement in waters around the United States, as it is has at the border. But there are legal ways to do so that stop far short of killing people based on suspicions, never publicly justified, that their boats are carrying drugs.
Until the past few weeks, the standard practice in these cases was for the Coast Guard to interdict the boats, seize the drugs, arrest the crew members and prosecute them. They then have a chance to defend themselves before possibly being convicted and subject to punishment. Federal law, first passed in 1949 and updated many times since, holds that only the Coast Guard — and not the Navy, the special forces or any other military branch — has the right to conduct law-enforcement operations on the high seas. (The Navy often supports the Coast Guard in these efforts.)
The administration has offered a couple of vague, unpersuasive justifications for its actions. For one thing, it has suggested that the Coast Guard law does not apply because Mr. Trump has declared certain drug cartels to be terrorist organizations. Under the war on terrorism authorizations put in place after Sept. 11, the military can indeed act against people deemed to be terrorists — but only those associated with the 2001 attacks. The administration has also claimed that Mr. Maduro has directed Tren de Aragua to invade the United States, making the situation akin to a war. Yet even intelligence agencies inside the government that Mr. Trump oversees have rejected the argument that Mr. Maduro controls Tren de Aragua.
Two Senate Democrats have introduced a resolution calling for an end to armed attacks that are not authorized by Congress, but Republican leaders thus far do not seem to be disturbed by the president’s power grab. In fact, congressional Republicans are considering a draft bill circulated by the White House that would explicitly give Mr. Trump the power to wage war against any drug traffickers he considers terrorists. The one virtue of the draft is that its existence implicitly acknowledges that he lacks that authority now.
In the meantime, Mr. Trump and top administration officials are attempting to obfuscate the illegality of their actions with a crude and unworthy machismo. “Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up — and it’ll happen again,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said about one of the boats. “This president is not a talker; he’s a doer.” Vice President JD Vance wrote that killing cartel members was the “highest and best use of our military,” and when one social media user told him that killing foreign civilians without due process was a war crime, Mr. Vance responded, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”
The model for this conduct seems to be former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, whom Mr. Trump has praised for shooting drug dealers in the streets without benefit of arrest or trial. Mr. Duterte is now facing trial before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, accused of overseeing the killing of more than 6,000 people suspected of being drug dealers and users. Mr. Trump has also admired China and Singapore for swiftly executing drug traffickers.
Brutal repression of drug dealing may be effective at reducing the flow of drugs in some circumstances. But the same is true of many other potential policies that violate the law and basic morality. Free, law-based countries do not shoot or imprison people based on only the government’s accusation that they are breaking the law.
The most successful strategies for reducing drug use involve a mix of law enforcement, prevention measures and treatment programs. The Trump administration, however, has demonstrated little interest in reducing drug abuse. The White House has sought huge cuts to programs designed to bring down that demand, including widely praised addiction medicine and harm reduction efforts, and it is cutting Medicaid, which will leave many users without access to effective treatment programs. It is doing so even though these programs helped produce a 26 percent decline in overdose deaths in 2024 from the year before.
Mr. Trump has always preferred incendiary, and often ineffective, displays of power to quiet, steady programs that work. His attacks at sea fit a disturbing pattern of using the military to address law-enforcement problems. Just as he continues to send the National Guard into cities in a supposed effort to reduce street crime, he wants to achieve the illusion of dominance over drug smuggling, even if his actions make little difference and even if he kills people, guilty or innocent, in the process. The price is a growing number of bodies of nameless foreign citizens who can never defend themselves. It is a moral stain on our nation.
Source photographs by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images and Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.
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