by Brett Rowland
President Donald Trump and his administration plan to inform Congress about using the military to combat drug traffickers, but have not said they will seek authorization to operate military force.
Since September, Trump has been using the US military to destroy boats suspected of drug trafficking in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The military campaign and buildup of U.S. military forces comes amid new pressure on Latin American countries.
On Friday, Trump ordered the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group to U.S. Southern Command.
“These forces will strengthen and expand existing capabilities to disrupt drug trafficking, degradation and dismantling [transnational criminal organizations]”said the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, in a statement.
Also on Friday, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control targeted Colombian President Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego for alleged drug activities, effectively cutting off Petro, his wife, son and a close associate from access to the U.S. financial system.
Friday’s moves follow a series of attacks by US troops on boats suspected of drug trafficking in the region. Previously, U.S. forces stopped and searched such boats and then handed over anyone on board to local authorities. But in September, Trump began blowing up boats suspected of being drug dealers. The US military carried out at least 10 such attacks, killing over 30 people.
Trump is also putting pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who is accused of consolidating his power through rigged elections. His 2024 re-election was widely condemned as illegitimate, amid allegations of vote rigging and intimidation of opposition leaders. Maduro also faces charges of human rights violations, corruption and involvement in the illegal drug trade. US prosecutors have accused Maduro of running a drug cartel that uses the cocaine trade as a tool to maintain the regime and have offered a $50 million reward for information leading to his arrest.
“We can go to the Senate, we can go to Congress and tell them about it. But I can’t imagine they would have any problem with it,” Trump said Thursday during a White House roundtable, discussing his plans to operate the military to pursue drug traffickers at sea and on land.
Democrats and Republicans have raised questions about the legality of the strikes and asked the administration for more information, including a legal justification.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, U.S. presidents of both parties have used the military to kill terrorists abroad, including members of al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Center for Constitutional Studies. Robert A. Levy at the Cato Institute, said that despite Trump’s decision to designate cartels and other groups as foreign terrorist organizations, US law limits the operate of the military even in international waters.
“It takes a lot of creative thinking to say that transporting drugs into the United States is the equivalent of flying a plane into a skyscraper or attacking the American embassy,” Olson told The Center Square.
Most of the boat strikes occurred near Venezuela.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has previously called for an investigation into Trump and other US officials over military attacks on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean. Petro recently proposed that Qatar could act as a mediator to assist stop the strikes.
Olson noted that during the long U.S. war on drugs, the tactic rarely resulted in a significant decline in drug supplies to the U.S. American demand for illegal drugs is not affected by military strikes.
“There is no reason to think this will reduce drug problems,” he told The Center Square.
He noted that previous U.S. crackdowns on illicit drugs often resulted in stronger drugs crossing the border as smugglers wanted to reduce risk and raise profits.
Olson said the recent decline in overdose deaths in the U.S. is worth investigating, but said the recent strikes are not related.
“This has nothing to do with these flashy captured-for-video attacks or the notion that it is too costly to continue to use Coast Guard boats to intercept these vessels,” he said. “Senator Rand Paul made an important point that I hope everyone will pay attention to, which is that we have a lot of data on the Coast Guard intercepting ships, and in about a quarter of the cases, they turn out to find no drugs, and they release all of them because they didn’t find drugs.”
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Brett Rowland is an award-winning journalist who has worked as an editor and reporter in newsrooms in Illinois and Wisconsin. He is an investigative reporter for Central Square.
