The DOJ Thinks Cocaine Couriers Are Not Worth Prosecuting. Trump Thinks They Deserve To Die.
Even as the president blows up drug boats, the government routinely declines to pursue charges against smugglers nabbed by the Coast Guard.
On September 2, President Donald Trump gleefully announced that he had ordered a "kinetic strike" on a speedboat "transporting illegal narcotics," killing 11 men he described as "positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists." That SEAL Team Six operation became newly controversial a few months later because it included a follow-up missile strike that obliterated two defenseless survivors of the initial attack as they clung to the smoldering wreckage. But even before that revelation, it was clear that the attack marked an alarming escalation of the war on drugs.
The September 2 operation inaugurated a deadly military campaign against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific that so far has killed 115 people in 35 attacks. This new anti-drug strategy treats cocaine couriers as "combatants" who can be killed at will, from a distance and in cold blood, rather than criminal suspects subject to arrest and prosecution. Yet remnants of the latter approach persist, creating contradictions that underline the illogic, immorality, and lawlessness of the murderous methods that Trump prefers.
The U.S. Coast Guard is still intercepting boats suspected of carrying illegal drugs, as it did for decades before Trump deemed that strategy insufficiently violent. Between September 1 and November 30, The New York Times reports, "the Coast Guard interdicted 38 vessels suspected of smuggling drugs." During the same period, the U.S. military blew up 22 suspected drug boats, killing 83 people. The smugglers who were lucky enough to be caught by the Coast Guard met a strikingly different fate: By and large, they were returned to their home countries because the Justice Department declined to prosecute them.
Under U.S. law, the death penalty generally is not available in drug cases. But the Trump administration says cocaine couriers deserve death, delivered without legal authorization or any semblance of due process, because supplying Americans with the drugs they want is tantamount to murder. It also says cocaine couriers are committing crimes so minor that prosecuting them would be a waste of Justice Department resources. That blatant inconsistency exposes the fallacy of conflating drug smuggling with violent aggression.
In an executive order he issued on his first day in office, Trump said "it is the policy of the United States to ensure the total elimination" of drug cartels. Toward that end, Attorney General Pam Bondi instructed federal prosecutors to eschew charges against low-level drug offenders, including smugglers very much like the ones Trump is summarily executing, in favor of higher-value cases involving "leaders and managers" of drug trafficking organizations.
"Under the total-elimination policy," Bondi wrote in a February 5 memo to Justice Department employees, "it will often be prudent to pursue removal from the United States of a low-level investigative target without immigration status, rather than incurring the time and resource costs associated with criminal prosecution. Similarly, because the Department is working toward elimination of these threats from the homeland, it will rarely be consistent with this policy to pursue foreign arrests and extraditions of targets who may be eligible for safety-valve relief or minor role adjustments. This includes foreign arrests of low-level narcotics offenders pursuant to the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act under Chapter 705 of Title 46."
That law authorizes the Coast Guard to intercept and arrest drug smugglers in international waters. But according to Bondi, such cases generally are not worth pursuing. So what happens to "low-level narcotics offenders" nabbed by the Coast Guard?
When the Justice Department "declines prosecution," the Coast Guard told the Times, "the Coast Guard coordinates either the direct repatriation to the detainee's country of nationality or transfer ashore to Department of Homeland Security custody for additional investigation and expedited removal." On November 19, for example, a Coast Guard cutter returned to Port Everglades after seizing 49,010 pounds of cocaine in 15 boat interdictions. "The cutter took custody of 36 smuggling suspects during the mission, repatriated 29 to Ecuador for prosecution and referred the others to the Justice Department," the Times reports. In other words, at least four-fifths of the crew members were deemed unworthy of federal prosecution.
According to Tampa defense attorneys who represent smuggling suspects, the Times says, their clients typically are "men so poor they get their lawyers through court appointment." They "don't own the boats and may not know where they are going until they reach a boat and are handed a GPS device with preprogrammed coordinates." They are "poor fishermen and farmers willing to risk their lives on the drug boats" in exchange for payments that reportedly range from $500 to $10,000 per trip.
It seems likely that many of the "narcoterrorists" whose deaths Trump has ordered fit that profile. We have no way of knowing for sure because the government has provided almost no information about the people killed in these strikes. In most cases, it has not even identified the criminal organizations for which they allegedly worked. But one thing is clear: The same crime cannot be so heinous that it merits the death penalty yet so petty that federal prosecutors can't be bothered to prove it.
