The U.S. military‘s strikes on three vessels this month that President Donald Trump said originated from Venezuela and were carrying illegal drugs heading for the United States have raised legal questions from experts.
Both Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth have declared that the drug cartels are targets that could be engaged with using deadly force as a part of the administration’s crackdown on cartel activity domestically and in the Western Hemisphere.
However, questions have emerged surrounding the legality of using lethal force to target these alleged drug smugglers instead of interdicting their ships, apprehending suspects, and bringing them back to the U.S. to await trial. This affords them due process, as the Coast Guard has done for decades.
“I think that these are legally unjustified uses of force by the United States,” Professor Geoffrey Corn, director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University, told the Washington Examiner.
The military carried out the first of these operations on Sept. 2. Trump said 11 people from Tren de Aragua, a Venezuela-based gang that the administration declared a foreign terrorist organization earlier this year, were killed in that attack. The second U.S. strike was on Sept. 15, and Trump said three people were killed. The president announced a third attack on Sept. 16 but did not share a casualty count.
Between the first and second strikes, the Department of Defense said two Venezuelan aircraft “flew near a U.S. Navy vessel in international waters” in a “highly provocative move designed to interfere with our counter-narco-terror operations.”
The U.S.’s use of military force to carry out drug interdictions is a dramatic shift. However, Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued in the aftermath of the first strike that the previous policy of interdicting drug smugglers on their way to the U.S. did not stop drugs from entering the country. More than 105,000 people in the U.S. died from drug-involved overdoses in 2023, a total that includes illicit and prescription drug overdoses, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
“The United States has long, for many, many years, established intelligence that allows us to interdict and stop drug boats, and we did that. And it doesn’t work,” Rubio said, “What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them.”
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“Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, he blew it up,” Rubio added.
The administration and the DOD have not shared the identities of the people killed or provided evidence to prove they were smuggling drugs.
“I think it’s an administration that seems to feel like it doesn’t own the American people an answer or any clarity on how lethal force is used in their name, and I know at this point, the global war on terror kind of helped it get us here, and that we got very blasé about regular military strikes conducted by US military assets for pretty dubious aims on the other side of the world, but this is a lot closer home,” Gil Barndollar, a nonresident fellow at Defense Priorities, told the Washington Examiner.
The U.S., like all nations, is allowed to use military force in self-defense against actual or imminent armed attacks. The administration has made the argument that targeting cartels is self-defense, considering the number of Americans who die from illegal drugs smuggled into the country.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told the New York Times that Trump’s order for the first strike “acted in line with the laws of armed conflict to protect our country from those trying to bring poison to our shores.”
Experts, Corn included, have raised questions about the White House’s justification.
“I cannot see a plausible case for treating the activities of this narco-gang as an armed attack against the United States, the administration in its war powers notification to Congress is drawing an analogy between the harm inflicted by narcotics and the harm that groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS want to inflict on the American people, and I am not dismissing in any way the danger of illegal narcotics, but the difference is groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS and Hezbollah and the Taliban and the far list goes on. Their goal, their intent, is to inflict death and destruction on an enemy,” Corn said.
Congress, not the president, has the power to declare war for the U.S. However, the president does have broad powers to respond when under attack. Lawmakers have not declared war since World War II, though since then, the U.S. has been involved in several conflicts in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and more.
“We did some things I think were legally very dubious, if not outright illegal, during the [Global War on Terror]. But I think what’s going on now puts that to shame,” Barndollar said. “The legality of it should have all Americans, irrespective of parties, asking hard questions.”
Corn also warned that the language used in Trump’s war powers notice to Congress, including that some countries in the region are unable or unwilling to address the threat, left open the possibility that he could order the military to conduct operations on Venezuelan soil.
It’s a “red flag that they’re contemplating conducting operations in Venezuela,” Corn said. “That’s the theory that there’s another state that’s allowing an organized enemy group to use its territory with impunity. It’s the theory that we use to justify going into Pakistan to attack Osama bin Laden.”
The Trump administration has taken an aggressive stance toward Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro since the outset of his term. The U.S. does not recognize him as the legitimate leader of Venezuela, has declared that he’s head of the Cartel of the Suns, and doubled its reward for information leading to his arrest from $25 million to $50 million. Attorney General Pam Bondi said last month that the U.S. has seized up to $700 million of assets allegedly linked to him.
The U.S. has significantly increased its military presence in the Caribbean Sea, where there is now the three-ship Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group, two guided-missile destroyers, a guided-missile cruiser, a nuclear attack submarine, and a Littoral Combat Ship.
“There’s little doubt that the size of the force that the United States has deployed to waters near Venezuela, but still in international waters, is a force that is much larger than would be needed for simply drug trafficking or for combating drug trafficking through the region,” Christopher Hernandez-Roy, deputy director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told the Washington Examiner.
Maduro, who has denied that he’s the head of the cartel, described the first strike earlier this week as a “military attack on civilians who were not at war and were not militarily threatening any country” and called it an “act of war.” Maduro also accused the U.S. of seeking “regime change for oil,” which Trump has denied.
Venezuela has also increased its military presence on its coastline.
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Trump said on Monday that his administration also plans on “stopping” drug cartels that transport illicit drugs over land, “the same way we stopped the boats.”
Barndollar said the buildup and military operations could be the start of an effort to topple the Maduro regime, though he warned that such an effort could have unintended consequences in the U.S.’s own backyard.
