War on Drugs

How Murdering Suspected Drug Smugglers Became the New Normal

A year after launching his explosive antidrug campaign, President Donald Trump routinely rains death on alleged cocaine couriers.

Jacob Sullum | From the November 2026 issue

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(Illustration: Joanna Andreasson Source images: iStockpaying)

President Donald Trump was excited about a new military operation. "Earlier this morning," he announced on the afternoon of September 2, 2025, "U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility." That attack should "serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America," he said. "BEWARE! Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!!!!!!!!!"

Those 11 exclamation points might have seemed like overkill. But Trump was right that Americans should have been paying attention. His Truth Social post, which included a 29-second video clip showing a speedboat in the Caribbean Sea exploded by a missile, marked a radical and alarming shift in U.S. drug policy.

Historically, the Coast Guard had tried to stop seaborne drugs by intercepting suspected smugglers and searching their vessels. It would seize any contraband it discovered and arrest the crew members. The Coast Guard still does that. But Trump views that approach as insufficiently aggressive. Under his new policy, the U.S. military blows up vessels believed to be transporting cocaine, obliterating them along with their crews.

From Trump's perspective, the advantages of that strategy are clear. There is no need to confirm that any given boat is in fact carrying drugs, let alone prove that allegation in court. By treating criminal suspects as "unlawful combatants" in an "armed conflict" with the United States, Trump has managed to circumvent both due process and the constraints imposed by the law of war.

Interdiction "doesn't work," Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained the day after the first boat strike. "Instead of interdicting it, on the president's orders, we blew it up. And it'll happen again."

Rubio was right that it would happen again. As of late August 2026, U.S. forces had used missiles to destroy boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific 68 times under Trump's orders, remotely killing 227 people in cold blood without any semblance of due process.

With a few exceptions, we do not know who those people were, let alone what evidence the government might have had to implicate them in drug trafficking. But Trump assures us they were all "narcoterrorists" who richly deserved their fate, even though they would not have faced the death penalty under U.S. law and, judging from what happened to drug smugglers arrested around the same time, probably would not have been prosecuted at all if they had been lucky enough to be caught by the Coast Guard.

All of this, Trump insists, is perfectly legal and amazingly effective. Although there is ample reason to reject both of those claims, the president has been completely unfazed by objections from legal experts, drug policy specialists, and members of Congress.

A year after Trump launched his bloodthirsty antidrug campaign, the summary execution of alleged drug smugglers had become the new normal. By literalizing the war on drugs, Trump has flouted the law, undermined basic principles of justice, and perverted the mission of the U.S. military, erasing the traditional distinction between combatants and civilians.

Trump Doesn't Know Who He Is Killing

As Trump told it, the inaugural boat strike, which happened in international waters near the northeastern coast of Venezuela, killed "11 terrorists." How did he know they were terrorists? Because, he said, all 11 men had been "positively identified" as members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, "a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization" (FTO) implicated in "mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and [the] Western Hemisphere."

That account was fishy from the beginning. Tren de Aragua has been linked to a variety of crimes, including drug and weapon trafficking, prostitution, kidnapping, extortion, robbery, and migrant smuggling. The motivation for all those activities is financial profit, as opposed to political or religious ideology. Yet terrorism usually is defined as "the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government, with the goal of furthering political, social, or ideological objectives."

Trump was right that the State Department nevertheless had listed Tren de Aragua as a "foreign terrorist organization," consistent with his January 2025 executive order instructing the secretary of state to designate that gang and "certain international cartels" as FTOs. As of August, the State Department listed nearly 100 FTOs, 20 of which were Latin American groups that had been added since the beginning of Trump's second term. In addition to Tren de Aragua, they included drug-trafficking organizations such as the Ecuadorian gang Los Lobos, the transnational gang Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), and the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels.

While the Trump administration has specifically mentioned Tren de Aragua as the target of some boat strikes, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also has referred more generally to "designated terrorist organizations." Those designations are under the control of the executive branch, which can expand the list whenever it wants, although Congress theoretically can block a new listing if it acts within seven days.

More to the point, an FTO designation is not a license to kill alleged members of a listed group at will. Rather, it means that the Treasury Department can block transactions involving the group's assets and that the Justice Department can prosecute people for supplying it with "material support or resources."

Nor was it clear how the government had "positively identified" all 11 men on the boat as "Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists." The sheer number of people aboard the vessel, which was notably larger than the crews on other boats that were subsequently attacked, cast doubt on that claim.

As The Intercept's Nick Turse noted three days after the attack, an 11-man crew would be "unusually large" for a drug boat. "Why would 11 people be on board a boat carrying drugs?" an unnamed "government source" who "had attended a classified briefing" wondered in a June 2026 interview with Turse. "It's a high risk for the cartels. That always stood out." During a closed briefing on Capitol Hill, Turse reported, a "top military officer" had "stated that some of the people killed by the U.S. military may have been the victims of human trafficking."

That concession contradicted what Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson had said during a press briefing on December 2, 2025. Wilson insisted that "every single person who we have hit thus far" was "a narcoterrorist," saying "our intelligence has confirmed that, and we stand by it." Yet according to Rep. Sara Jacobs (D–Calif.), Turse noted, "Pentagon officials who briefed her admitted that the administration does not know the identities of all the individuals who were killed in the strikes."

Trump himself has joked about the potential for lethal errors. "I think anybody that saw that is going to say, 'I'll take a pass,'" he said after the first boat attack. "I don't even know about fishermen. They may say, 'I'm not getting on the boat. I'm not going to take a chance.'"

Turse highlighted another facet of the first boat attack that would later provoke congressional concern. Eight days after that operation, he reported that some of the people on the boat "survived an initial strike" and "were........

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