Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters that the United States has “absolute and complete authority” to kill suspected drug smugglers in “defense of the American people.”
Hegseth was asked by a reporter on Thursday what legal authority the Pentagon invoked when it conducted an airstrike in international waters against a boat that the Trump administration alleges was carrying 11 “narcoterrorists” and members of the Venezuela-based crime group Tren de Aragua.
He responded, “We have the absolute authority and complete authority to conduct that.”
“First of all, just the defense of the American people alone. A hundred thousand Americans were killed each year under the previous administration because of an open border and open drug traffic flow. That is an assault on the American people,” he said.
“I’d say we smoked a drug boat, and there’s 11 narcoterrorists at the bottom of the ocean. And when other people try to do that, they’re gonna meet the same fate.”
In a Wednesday appearance on Fox & Friends, Hegseth said, “We knew exactly who was in that boat, we knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented, and that was Tren de Aragua ... trying to poison our country with illicit drugs.” He has thus far declined to reveal how the Pentagon identified the boat or those aboard as belonging to Tren de Aragua.
“What we have, there in the Caribbean, is clear demonstration of military might,” Hegseth said.
President Donald Trump announced the strike in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday, writing, “Earlier this morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility.“ The U.S. designated Tren de Aragua a terrorist group in February.
“The strike occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States. The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action. No U.S. Forces were harmed in this strike. Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE!”
Attached to the president’s post was a purported video of the strike, which Venezuelan Communications Minister Freddy Nanez dismissed as fake, describing it as looking “cartoonish” and “generated by AI.”
“The video shows a ship being attacked and then exploding in a way that looks like a simplified, almost cartoonish animation, rather than a realistic depiction of an explosion,” he wrote on Instagram.
Vice President JD Vance made a similar claim when asked about the strike on Wednesday.
“I mean, the legal authority, and I want to talk about these kids, is that there are people who are bringing literal terrorists, who are bringing deadly drugs into our country, and the president of the United States ran on a promise of stopping this poison from coming into our country,” he said.
Trump instructed the military to target drug cartels in Latin America last month and deployed multiple warships near Venezuela. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said the move was an “extravagant, unjustifiable, immoral and absolutely criminal and bloody threat,” and deployed warships of his own.
The crime of drug trafficking does not carry the death penalty in the U.S., though it does in some countries..
Executions for drug-related offences made up 42 percent of all executions worldwide in 2023, with five countries carrying them out: Iran, Kuwait, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and China.
Former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested in March on a warrant from the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity during his eight-year-long ‘war on drugs’ that involved the extrajudicial killing of people suspected of drug offences and resulted in the deaths of over 12,000 Filipinos.
