Trump Calls His Drone Strike on an Alleged Drug Boat 'Self-Defense.' It Looks More Like Murder.
Equating drug trafficking with armed aggression, the president asserts the authority to kill anyone he perceives as a threat to "our most vital national interests."
Last week, President Donald Trump ordered a drone strike that sank a speedboat in the Caribbean Sea, killing all 11 people on board. Trump described the targets as members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua who were "at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States." Although the men could have been intercepted and arrested, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters, the president decided their summary execution was appropriate as a deterrent to drug trafficking.
On Wednesday, The New York Times, citing unnamed "American officials familiar with the matter," reported that the boat "appeared to have turned around before the attack started because the people onboard had apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking it." That detail further complicates the already dubious legal and moral rationales for this unprecedented use of the U.S. military to kill criminal suspects.
The attack "crossed a fundamental line the Department of Defense has been resolutely committed to upholding for many decades—namely, that (except in rare and extreme circumstances not present here) the military must not use lethal force against civilians, even if they are alleged, or even known, to be violating the law," Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman notes in a Just Security essay. Lederman adds that the September 2 drone strike "appears to have violated" the executive order prohibiting assassination and arguably qualifies as murder under federal law and the Uniform Code of Criminal Justice.
New York University law professor Ryan Goodman, a former Defense Department lawyer, agrees. "It's difficult to imagine how any lawyers inside the Pentagon could have arrived at a conclusion that this was legal," he told the Times last week, "rather than the very definition of murder under international law rules that the Defense Department has long accepted."
As Trump told it, the attack was justified because Tren de Aragua is "a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of [Venezuelan President] Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western Hemisphere." He said the strike was meant to "serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America."
Drug cartels have "wrought devastating consequences on American communities for decades, causing the deaths of tens of thousands of United States citizens each year and threatening our national security and foreign policy interests both at home and abroad," Trump said in a September 4 letter to Congress. "We have now reached a critical point where we must meet this threat to our citizens and our most vital national interests with United States military force in self-defense."
U.S. forces therefore "struck a vessel" that "was assessed to be affiliated with a designated terrorist organization and to be engaged in illicit drug trafficking activities," Trump explained. "I directed these actions consistent with my responsibility to protect Americans and United States interests abroad and in furtherance of United States national security and foreign policy interests, pursuant to my constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive to conduct United States foreign relations."
Trump says the men whose deaths he ordered were "assessed" to be affiliated with Tren de Aragua. They also were "assessed" to be engaged in drug trafficking. Without knowing the basis for those assessments, we cannot say how accurate they were. Last week, Trump joked about the potential for deadly errors: "I think anybody that saw that is going to say, 'I'll take a pass.' 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.'" Conveniently for Trump, summary execution avoids any need to present evidence, let alone meet the requirements of due process.
"Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military," Vice President J.D. Vance declared in an X post on Saturday. When a commenter observed that "killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime," Vance replied, "I don't give a shit what you call it."
That was too much for Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.). "Did he ever read To Kill a Mockingbird?" Paul wondered. "Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation? What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial."
Trump's justification for that shortcut is perverse. Although he describes the strike as an act of "self-defense," he does not claim the alleged drug traffickers were engaged in a literal attack on the United States. To accept Trump's framing, you have to accept the premise that transporting illegal drugs is tantamount to violent aggression. Although that would be consistent with Trump's often expressed desire to kill drug dealers, it is not consistent with the way drug laws are ordinarily enforced.
In the absence of violent resistance, a police officer who decided to shoot a drug suspect dead rather than take him into custody would be guilty of murder. Morally speaking, this situation is no different. That much is clear even without considering the fundamental injustice of criminalizing conduct that violates no one's rights, such as the exchange of drugs for money.
Tren de Aragua's designation as a "terrorist organization" does not affect this analysis. Trump administration officials "admit they could have interdicted the boat and detained the people on board," notes George Mason law professor Ilya Somin. "They did not pose any imminent threat of violence, and they were not combatants in any war against the US. Calling them 'narco-terrorists' does not change these obvious facts."
As Reason's Matthew Petti observes, the unprovoked attack on a boat allegedly carrying drugs "shows how 'terrorism' makes everyone killable." But that rhetorical license to kill does not amount to a legal justification.
"The State Department designation merely triggers the government's ability to implement asset controls and other economic sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and other statutes," Lederman notes. "It has nothing to do with authorizing [the Defense Department] to engage in targeted killings…which is why the U.S. military doesn't go around killing members of all designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations."
Nor can Trump cite any other statute that transforms murder into self-defense in this context. Instead, he is relying on his "constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive" to use deadly force against civilians he perceives as a threat to "national security and foreign policy interests."
That logic could be extended beyond drug trafficking. Since Trump frequently describes illegal immigration as an "invasion," might he decide he has the authority to order the summary execution of people trying to enter the country without permission? Scott R. Anderson, a senior fellow in the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School, notes that "many of the legal arguments that the Trump administration has advanced in relation to narcotics trafficking might also extend to other, far more troubling uses of force that certain administration officials have reportedly raised—for example, the use of lethal force against unlawful migrants whose transport is facilitated by Tren de Aragua."
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly claims Trump "acted in line with the laws of armed conflict to protect our country" from "evil narcoterrorists trying to poison our homeland." But even if you accept the specious equation of drug smuggling with armed aggression, it seems relevant that the alleged Tren de Aragua drug boat reportedly was turning back when the drone strike was launched. "If someone is retreating, where's the 'imminent threat' then?" Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, formerly the top judge advocate general for the Navy, asked in an interview with The New York Times. "Where's the 'self-defense'? They are gone if they ever existed—which I don't think they did."
Rear Adm. James E. McPherson, who served in the same position as Guter and was also general counsel to the Army during the first Trump administration, was similarly skeptical. "I would be interested if they could come up [with] any legal basis for what they did," he said. "If, in fact, you can fashion a legal argument that says these people were getting ready to attack the U.S. through the introduction of cocaine or whatever, if they turned back, then that threat has gone away."
Geoffrey Corn, formerly the Army's chief adviser on the law of war, likewise does not buy the "self-defense" argument. "I think it's a terrible precedent," he told the Times. "We've crossed a line here."