President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the U.S. military struck another small boat off the coast of Venezuela, killing six people.
“Under my Standing Authorities as Commander-in-Chief, this morning, the Secretary of War, ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO) conducting narcotrafficking,” Trump posted on Truth Social.
Trump said intelligence confirmed that the vessel was trafficking narcotics and was associated with illicit narcoterrorist networks.
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The strike marks the fifth deadly strike on an alleged drug-carrying vessel in the region. At least 27 people have been killed in the five strikes, according to the Trump administration.
The administration has justified its military actions in the Western Hemisphere as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the United States. Earlier this year, the president designated gangs, including Tren de Aragua, as foreign terrorist organizations to combat the flow of drugs, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said are “headed to America to poison our people.”
Human rights groups, as well as members of Congress on both sides of the political aisle, have questioned the legality of the strikes.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has openly challenged that if all of the boats that were struck in the Caribbean had drug dealers on them, then “what were their names” and “what was the evidence linking them to being part of a gang?”
“The Coast Guard, when they interdict boats, … about 25% of the time the boat that they board doesn’t have drugs on it. So they have made an error, but they don’t kill them,” Paul told Bloomberg last week.
A Coast Guard official told Military Times that one such incident occurred on Sept. 13, when a Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachment that was operating onboard a U.S. military vessel boarded a vessel in the Caribbean “based on reasonable suspicion of illicit drug trafficking activity.”
“No contraband was found, and the vessel was promptly released to continue its voyage,” the official added.
Rand said the U.S. should not have a policy of blowing up suspicious ships before boarding them.
“We will board your boat. If they don’t halt and stop, there’s an escalation of use of force, but we don’t just blow ships up,” he added.
Democrats contend the strikes violate U.S. and international law, with Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., calling them “illegal killings.”
The Senate voted last week on a war powers resolution that would require Congress to specifically authorize military strikes before they occur, but it failed to pass.
Prior to Tuesday’s strike, the most recent strike ocurred Oct. 3., which killed four people, according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Trump in a social media post on Sept. 19 said a U.S. strike killed three in a vessel “affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization conducting narcotrafficking.” He did not specify where in U.S. Southern Command the deadly strike had occurred.
On Sept. 15, Trump announced the U.S. military had carried out a strike on a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela, killing three on board. That followed a deadly military strike on a speedboat on Sept. 2 that killed 11.
Neither the military nor the White House has identified which U.S. military ships and assets have been used to carry out the strikes, a vast departure from the military’s previous transparency on U.S. strike operations, including transparency granted during the first Trump administration.
