Trump Claims the Power to Summarily Kill Suspected Drug Smugglers

Trump Claims the Power to Summarily Kill Suspected Drug Smugglers

The move to treat criminals as if they were wartime combatants escalated an administration pattern of using military force for law enforcement tasks at home and abroad.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/04/us/politics/trump-drug-smugglers-military.html

By Charlie Savage

Reporting from Washington
Sept. 4, 2025Updated 8:52 p.m. ET



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“It’s difficult to imagine how any lawyers inside the Pentagon could have arrived at a conclusion that this was legal rather than the very definition of murder under international law rules that the Defense Department has long accepted,” said Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor who worked as a Pentagon lawyer in 2015 and 2016.

Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, emphasized in a statement late on Wednesday that the strike took place in international waters and did not put American troops at risk. She said that Mr. Trump had directed the attack in “defense of vital U.S. national interests and in the collective self-defense of other nations who have long suffered due to the narcotics trafficking and violent cartel activities of such organizations.”

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“Here the president appears to be invoking his amorphous constitutional authority to kill low-level drug couriers on the high seas, with no due process, arrest or trial,” he said, adding: “Viewed in isolation, labeling drug cartels ‘terrorists’ and invoking the ‘national interests’ to use the U.S. military to summarily kill low-level drug couriers is pretty extreme.”

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Earlier this summer, Mr. Trump signed a still-secret order directing the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels his administration has deemed terrorist organizations. In the aftermath of the first such operation this week, he and two top administration officials — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as the national security adviser — promised to keep doing it.

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Details about the strike on Tuesday remain unclear. It has been claimed the boat was in international waters and carrying 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang and a shipment of drugs. The administration has not said precisely where the strike took place or whether the boat was flagged to any country. It hasn't relased the names of the dead people, Sec'try Hegseth claimed on Wednesday the government “knew exactly who” they were and “exactly what they were doing.” While TACO has claimed “we have tapes of them speaking.”

Bullshit.