Trump officials defend lethal strike on alleged Venezuelan drug boat

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “has some decisions to make” after the lethal U.S. strike on a boat in the Caribbean Sea that President Donald Trump said was operated by drug smugglers connected to the authoritarian leader.

Maduro is running the South American nation “effectively as a kingpin of a drug narco state,” Hegseth said on “Fox & Friends” Wednesday morning, a day after the military strike killed 11. “Nicolás Maduro, as he considers whether or not he wants to continue be a narco trafficker, has some decisions to make.”

The strike was dramatic escalation for the United States in its fight against drug traffickers and strains already tense relations with Venezuela. The Trump administration has not provided a legal justification for launching a lethal strike against civilians in international waters outside of an armed conflict.

“We have tapes of them speaking,” Trump said from the Oval Office on Wednesday. “It was massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people, and everybody fully understands it. You see it, you see the bags of drugs all over the boat and they were hit.”

Aerial imagery posted by Trump on Tuesday shows a modestly sized boat speeding through open water and then being engulfed in flames. U.S. authorities have not said how they targeted the boat, who was on board or what kinds and quantities of drugs they were allegedly smuggling.

Trump said U.S. forces had “positively identified” the vessel’s crew as members of Tren de Aragua, a criminal group his administration has sought to connect to Maduro and violent crime in the U.S. Hegseth said Wednesday the U.S. government “knew exactly who was in that boat” and identified them as “Tren de Aragua, a narco-terrorist organization designated by the United States, trying to poison our country with illicit drugs.”

Tren de Aragua has not been associated with large-scale drug trafficking, said Jeremy McDermott, the co-founder and co-director of InSight Crime, which has researched the Venezuelan gang. The gang, which has a presence in several Latin American countries, has focused on extortion, human smuggling, and human trafficking, preying particularly on Venezuelans who have fled Maduro’s rule.

“Up until now, we do not qualify the Tren de Aragua as a transnational drug trafficking organization,” McDermott said. “We have been unable to link it to any multiton shipments crossing any frontiers.”

South America has in recent years produced record amounts of cocaine to ship to the United States and Europe, but it’s unclear how much of the drug flows through Venezuela. Maduro’s government does not release reliable seizure data.

A retired Drug Enforcement Administration agent who was involved in Venezuela investigations in recent years said Venezuelan government officials since former president Hugo Chávez have allowed cocaine to be trafficked unimpeded from Venezuela to the United States and taken a cut of the proceeds. The agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, compared the system to the U.S. mafia model, in which people or families control regions.

The former agent said the Tren de Aragua was not a focus of his investigations into drug trafficking in Venezuela in recent years.

The U.S. Coast Guard sometimes shoots out the engines of go-fast boats during maritime interdictions, the former agent said, but killing the crew is new for the United States.

“How long are you going to do it?” he asked. “The drug traffickers are like cockroaches. They’ll wait you out. They’ll do something else and once you leave, they’ll go back.”

The U.S. has dispatched an unusually large number of warships to the waters around Central and South American for what officials have described as anti-drug-trafficking operations. Maduro has warned Venezuelans of a possible U.S. invasion, dispatched troops to Venezuela’s border with Colombia and called on civilians to join militias to defend the country.

Neither Maduro nor other top Venezuelan officials have responded publicly to the attack Tuesday. But communications minister Freddy Ñáñez claimed the video released by Trump was created using artificial intelligence.

“Enough of Marco Rubio’s warmongering and attempts to stain President Donald Trump’s hands with blood,” Ñáñez said in a social media post.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro called the attack “murder.”

“We have been capturing civilians transporting drugs for decades without killing them,” Petro said. “Those who transport drugs are not the big drug lords, but very poor young people from the Caribbean and the Pacific.”

Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of law at Notre Dame, said intentionally killing suspects outside of armed conflict violated “fundamental principles of international law.”

On Capitol Hill, congressional staffers said Wednesday that lawmakers have pressed the Trump administration for details but had so far received no substantive response.

Adam Smith (D-Washington), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, called the strike “deeply concerning.”

“The administration has not identified the authority under which this action was taken, raising the question of its legality and constitutionality,” Smith said. “The lack of information and transparency from the Administration is even more concerning. Does this mean Trump thinks he can use the U.S. military anywhere drugs exist, are sold, or shipped? What is the risk of dragging the United States into yet another military conflict?”