Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the United States’s most recent strike against a Venezuelan boat said to be smuggling drugs to the United States amid concerns from outside the Trump administration.
“The Department of War has tremendous confidence in the way they are gathering information. They know who’s on those boats. They know what those boats are doing,” Rubio said on Fox News’s Fox News Sunday. “They have the highest confidence in this because of the work that goes into us, because of the tremendous amount of caution they’re taking in deciding who to strike and who not to strike.”
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REPUBLICANS ARE PUSHING THESE FIVE DEMOCRATS TO FLIP ON FUNDING BILL
.@SecRubio on strikes on drug-running boats: "In the past, there has been efforts to interdict them. Now, the effort is to stop them… For the first time in our history, the U.S. military is operating in our region, in our hemisphere, against these traffickers of poison." pic.twitter.com/USHNvDHpxl
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) October 5, 2025
Late last week, the U.S. military carried out another strike against a vessel that originated in Venezuela and was believed by U.S. authorities to be smuggling a large amount of drugs to the U.S.
Historically, the U.S. Coast Guard has interdicted suspected drug smugglers at sea, arrested those on board, and seized the narcotics load.
Under President Donald Trump, the Department of War has chosen to take a different approach, striking vessels and killing their occupants while still far off from the U.S. Four people were killed in the latest strike.
Trump alerted Congress that the U.S. was in a “non-international armed conflict” with Venezuelan drug cartels. The Trump administration has gone so far as to classify the drug cartels as terrorist organizations.
In this latest case, Rubio said the U.S. military does not “take shots at” boats without “100% certainty” of who and what is on board.
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Earlier this morning, on President Trump's orders, I directed a lethal, kinetic strike on a narco-trafficking vessel affiliated with Designated Terrorist Organizations in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the… pic.twitter.com/QpNPljFcGn
— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) October 3, 2025
“I can’t tell you the tactics or how it comes about in terms of how we gather the intelligence,” Rubio said. “I would ask people for some common sense, OK? What is a boat doing 15 miles into international waters with four 450 engines on the back of it, no fishing rods — clear markings of drugs on those boats. We know who these boats are. We’ve known who these boats are for a very long time.
“In the past, there’s been efforts to interdict them. Now the effort is to stop them. They are headed towards the United States through a logistics chain they’ve created in the Caribbean, and that needs to stop,” Rubio said. “For the first time in our history, the U.S. military is operating in our region, in our hemisphere, against these traffickers of poison who are ultimately winding up in our streets, contributing to crime in our streets, not to mention the death of Americans.”
War Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Sunday that the military has “every authorization needed” to conduct the lethal strikes, citing cartels’ designation as terrorist organizations. “They’re a threat to the homeland. … They’ve been poisoning our people for far too long, and President Trump said, ‘No more.”
U.S. STRIKES VESSEL OFF VENEZUELA COAST KILLING FOUR, HEGSETH SAYS
The U.S. does not view Nicolas Maduro as the legitimate leader of Venezuela and has classified him as the head of the Cartel of the Suns.
In July, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the U.S. had seized as much as $700 million of assets linked to Maduro.