The Trump administration has offered few details about a U.S. military strike on a boat in the Caribbean Sea that it has asserted killed 11 Venezuelan drug traffickers, fueling questions as to whether it violated maritime law or human rights conventions.
President Trump, who announced Tuesday that American forces destroyed a vessel from Venezuela allegedly carrying illegal narcotics, claimed the boat was bound for the U.S. and operated by the Tren de Aragua cartel, which the U.S. has designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
Trump has shared a video appearing to show drone footage of a boat on the water exploding and then on fire, but the Pentagon has not released any specifics about the strike, including how it was carried out and how much and what kind of drugs were on board.
Nor has the administration said what legal authority officials relied upon to justify the move — an unprecedented and significant escalation by the White House against Latin American drug cartels, given that narcotic runners are typically rounded up by the Coast Guard instead of being fired upon by U.S. aircraft.
Experts have accused the administration of violating international law.
“These extrajudicial killings are a clear violation of international law,” Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said in a statement to The Hill. “If there are no consequences, we should be extremely concerned about what comes next — will this administration begin executing alleged gang members or drug dealers at home without any judicial process?”
On Thursday, the administration was set to provide to Congress its rationale for the strike, a legal deadline to send a report to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) detailing its reasons for the attack.
The administration so far has suggested the president’s authority to defend the U.S. is sufficient in justifying carrying out the strike, the same rationale used for the Pentagon’s months-long bombing campaign of Houthi targets in Yemen earlier this spring.
Ahead of the report, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday alluded to this rationale.
“President Trump has shown whether it’s the southwest border, whether it’s the Houthis in freedom of navigation, whether it’s Midnight Hammer in Iran, that the precise application of American power can have incredible impacts and reshape dynamics around the world and in the region,” Hegseth said on “Fox & Friends,” referring to the U.S. strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites in June.
“This is a deadly, serious mission for us, and it won’t stop with just this strike. Anyone else trafficking in the waters who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate,” he added.
And Trump on Wednesday again insisted the boat was laden with drugs and that the attack on it would deter cartels from similar actions in the future.
“On the boat they had massive amounts of drugs. We have tapes of them speaking, it was massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people and everybody fully understands that,” Trump said from the Oval Office.
“In fact you see it, you see the bags of drugs all over the boat. And they were hit, obviously they won’t be doing it again. And I think a lot of other people won’t be doing it again,” he added.
Trump has repeatedly alleged the Tren de Aragua cartel is being controlled by Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking in Mexico City the same day, said Washington has long had the intelligence to help the U.S. intercept boats carrying drugs, but “it doesn’t work.”
“What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them,” Rubio said at a news conference, adding, “it’ll happen again.”
“The president of the United States is going to wage war on narco-terrorist organizations,” Rubio said, noting that Trump has the right “to eliminate imminent threats to the United States.”
He did not answer a question as to whether the administration had a legal basis for the strike.
The Pentagon and the White House did not respond to questions from The Hill as to the details of the strike, including the type and quantity of drugs deemed onboard the vessel and the legal justification used to carry it out.
Human rights groups say the attack has potentially violated a whole host of international standards and Washington’s own regulations for maritime operations against civilian vessels in international waters.
The president’s war powers, as stipulated under the Constitution, are typically limited to events where groups have done violent harm to U.S. citizens and interests. But given that the administration appeared to target drug traffickers in a situation where it’s not clear if the group was armed or if it had plans to physically harm Americans, experts warn the strike sets a dangerous precedent.
“What we have seen so far suggests that the U.S. armed forces did something that it has never done, to our knowledge, in more than 35 years of military involvement in drug interdiction in the Caribbean Sea: an instant escalation to disproportionate lethal force against a civilian vessel without any apparent self-defense justification,” according to a Wednesday statement from the Washington Office on Latin America, an organization that promoted human rights in Latin America and the Caribbean.
“Mere suspicion of carrying drugs, or merely being pursued by (much faster) naval vessels or other military assets in international waters, are not offenses that carry a death sentence, much less summary execution,” the group added.