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The president’s Caribbean boat strikes are setting a dangerous new precedent.

By Conor Friedersdorf

On President Donald Trump’s orders, the U.S. military last month began carrying out a series of strikes in the Caribbean, blowing up boats suspected of moving drugs and killing a total of at least 27 people so far. (Multiple news outlets reported that a strike yesterday was believed to be the first one to leave survivors.) Although Trump has called the dead “narcoterrorists,” his administration has not provided good evidence to support that characterization. Even pundits who defended extrajudicial killings during the War on Terror years—including Lawfare’s Ben Wittes, National Review’s Andy McCarthy, and John Yoo, the author of the so-called torture memos—have deemed these strikes illegal or legally suspect.

Yet the American people don’t seem particularly concerned. A recent Harris survey found that 71 percent of registered voters support “destroying boats bringing drugs into the United States,” and the strikes have prompted little public outcry. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama meted out death without due process even outside the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, inuring Americans to the practice. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that the Obama administration carried out 563 strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, killing 384 to 807 civilians, in addition to militants. If, as Trump repeatedly asserts, “narcoterrorists” from the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua pose a threat to national security, simply killing them without due process might seem to many casual observers like continuity. This is what the United States did to men like Ayman al-Zawahiri. Why not do it to men like Pablo Escobar?

That thinking is dangerous. To kill needlessly, when you could easily detain and prosecute, is morally wrong. Ongoing lethal strikes will inflict carnage on innocents. It will also sow hatred of the United States in our hemisphere as surely as War on Terror drone strikes did in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And if Americans become desensitized to these killings as a routine tactic in the War on Drugs, the threat to civil liberties at home and abroad is profound. Drug trafficking is endemic, and will always be endemic, in free societies. Every plane in the sky, every boat in the ocean, and every truck on the highway could plausibly be smuggling drugs on behalf of a dangerous cartel. If the president is permitted to blow up modes of transport on his suspicion of drug running alone, and without having to provide proof even after the fact about the identity of the people he killed, the War on Drugs will have rendered the Bill of Rights void. No one will be safe from a president’s dictatorial power to kill without evidence, arrest, or trial.

Trump is almost certainly misleading the public about whom he is killing. There has been no definitive accounting of the identity or even the nationality of the people who have been struck. (“Evidence suggests that the last boat bombed was Colombian with Colombian citizens,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro posted on social media last week.) But drug boats are most often driven by impoverished fishermen, not dangerous drug kingpins, three Ohio State University professors found in a May 2025 analysis of federal punishments handed out to the hundreds of people arrested each year for transporting drugs by boat. A typical crew might include a fisherman recruited for knowledge of the ocean, a mechanic, and an unskilled laborer, and only rarely are they armed. Many are motivated by “economic desperation,” the professors write, or describe “being forced to join smuggling crews” under threat. Trump wants the public to believe that his lethal new tactic will eliminate dangerous knights in a geopolitical chess game against drug cartels. But the tactic is likelier to kill hapless pawns.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio argues that “the president has a right to eliminate immediate threats to the United States.” But the targeted boats were all in international waters, many miles from America’s coast. They posed no threat at all, in that the Coast Guard could easily have done an interdiction, and certainly no “immediate” threat: Some of the boats didn’t even have enough fuel to reach the U.S. mainland, my Atlantic colleagues recently reported.

At times, Trump defends the strikes by arguing that the ends justify the means. “You know, it’s a pretty tough thing we’ve been doing, but you have to think of it this way: Every one of those boats is responsible for the death of 25,000 American people and the destruction of families,” he said in a speech earlier this month. “So when you think of it that way, what we’re doing is actually an act of kindness.” He added, “We’re so good at it that there are no boats––in fact, even fishing boats, no one wants to go into the water anymore.” In this telling, killing drug runners is such a good deterrent that no one wants to move drugs by boat in the Caribbean anymore, or even do their daily fishing. And the deaths, as well as the unintended consequence of fishing villages being afraid to seek food, are worth it to stop drug fatalities in the United States.

But the idea that these strikes will save tens of thousands of American lives is dubious. As my colleague Nick Miroff recently wrote, fentanyl isn’t reaching America via drug boats in the Caribbean, which mostly traffic in cocaine and marijuana. And even most cocaine reaches America by land, via organizations based in Colombia and Mexico, rather than the Venezuelans the United States is now targeting.
If Trump is trying to stop the flow of drugs, blowing up rather than interdicting boats might also be counterproductive. Typically, U.S. Coast Guard patrol planes, cutters, and helicopters identify and intercept vessels suspected of carrying drugs––most commonly small, open fishing boats with outboard motors. When drugs are found, they are seized, and those on board are arrested. Intelligence collected during such interdictions offers insights into transnational criminal organizations, a 2025 Department of Homeland Security inspector-general report noted. Officers search “cellular phones, radios, thumb drives, computers, global positioning systems, electronic navigation systems, and encryption devices,” accumulating intelligence and clues “such as drop off locations, call records, or phone numbers to further the investigation.” Detainees not only share valuable details about the organizations that hired them, but also establish links to higher-level narcotraffickers that enable future extraditions––information the state finds so valuable that prosecutors frequently give lighter sentences in return for cooperation. Even to a ruthless utilitarian, killing rather than capturing alleged drug traffickers has big downsides.

If the official reasons offered for these strikes don’t check out, is there a different agenda at work? The New York Times and the Miami Herald have suggested that Trump’s policy is really about undermining the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who already has a $50 million U.S. State Department bounty on his head. The goal is “cutting off the drug revenue that sustains loyalty among Venezuela’s senior military and police commanders,” the Herald wrote. NBC news reported on September 26, based on four sources, that “U.S. military officials are drawing up options to target drug traffickers inside Venezuela, and strikes within that country’s borders could potentially begin in a matter of weeks.” Trump recently acknowledgedthat his administration had authorized the CIA to carry out covert actions in Venezuela and said, “We are certainly looking at land now.” The Spanish newspaper El País reported that “Venezuela is training its civilian population” in case the United States attacks.

Regardless of what is motivating Trump, these killings are a civil-liberties nightmare. If he is fighting the drug war, he is doing so in the manner of a Latin American strongman, not a president. When prosecuted under the laws that Congress has established and sentenced by judges and juries, no individual, let alone a low-level mariner or mechanic, has received the death penalty for mere drug smuggling without any related homicide. American courts regularly distinguish between leaders on drug runs and mere crew members with little knowledge of or involvement in what’s on board, giving longer sentences to higher-level traffickers and repeat offenders.

Differentiating a poor fisherman whose wife is being held hostage by a cartel from a narcoterrorist who chose a life of violent crime would seem to be morally obligatory when deciding what punishment to give in any system of justice––but is impossible if you blow them all up, subverting the role of the judiciary in crime and punishment.

And if Trump is, in fact, pursuing regime change in Venezuela, he is doing it in a way that subverts the Constitution, which vests Congress with the power to declare war, even when a foreign regime is as appalling and abusive as the one that holds power in Venezuela. The precedent that Trump is setting threatens the rule of law and everyone’s rights. And while the average American can be forgiven for becoming inured to extrajudicial killings, and for not knowing who actually pilots drug boats in the Caribbean, Congress is responsible for stopping the president from violating the laws that it passes, transgressing against the Constitution, and wantonly killing civilians.

Whether Trump himself could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue without losing any voters, as he suggested in 2016, remains an unsettled question. But so far, he has blown up more than 20 times as many civilians on the high seas. What won’t Congress let him get away with?