On September 2, 2025, the Trump administration announced that U.S. military forces had carried out a strike on a boat in the Caribbean, killing 11 people. The White House said the strike targeted members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang it has designated as a foreign terrorist organization. Officials claimed the vessel was carrying narcotics to the United States, though no evidence has been provided to substantiate the allegations.
“Earlier this morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, after the attack. “Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE!”
The White House amplified the announcement with an image of Trump looking at a phone showing the moment of the explosion. The post declared: “TERRORISTS ELIMINATED. ADIÓS,” accompanied by a trash-emoji. Another post asserted: “ON VIDEO: U.S. Military Forces conducted a strike against Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists. The strike occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the U.S. The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action.”
A brief black and white video circulated by the administration purported to show the strike. But the Associated Press reported that the footage “is not clear enough to see if the craft is carrying as many as 11 people” and “did not show any large or clear stashes of drugs inside the boat.” The White House has not explained how officials determined the victims were Tren de Aragua members. The Pentagon has declined to provide details about the type of weapons used, the quantity of drugs allegedly onboard, or the legal authority for the strike.
Administration officials have defended the action as a necessary measure to deter cartels. From the Oval Office, Trump insisted: “On the boat they had massive amounts of drugs. We have tapes of them speaking, it was massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people and everybody fully understands that. In fact you see it, you see the bags of drugs all over the boat. And they were hit, obviously they won’t be doing it again. And I think a lot of other people won’t be doing it again.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking in Mexico City the same day, argued that Washington had long had the intelligence to intercept narcotics but that traditional interdiction methods were insufficient. “What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them,” he said. “It’ll happen again.” Rubio added, “The president of the United States is going to wage war on narco-terrorist organizations,” insisting Trump has the right “to eliminate imminent threats to the United States.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth echoed the administration’s rationale, citing Trump’s earlier strikes abroad. “President Trump has shown whether it’s the southwest border, whether it’s the Houthis in freedom of navigation, whether it’s Midnight Hammer in Iran, that the precise application of American power can have incredible impacts and reshape dynamics around the world and in the region,” Hegseth said on Fox & Friends. “This is a deadly, serious mission for us, and it won’t stop with just this strike. Anyone else trafficking in the waters who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate.”
The White House later released a statement from deputy press secretary Anna Kelly: “This Presidentially-directed strike was conducted against the operations of a designated terrorist organization and was taken in defense of vital U.S. national interests and in the collective self-defense of other nations who have long suffered due to the narcotics trafficking and violent cartel activities of such organizations. The strike was fully consistent with the law of armed conflict. This precision strike in international waters was conducted in a manner to minimize the risk to U.S. personnel and did not entail the use of ground forces.”
Despite those claims, human rights experts and constitutional lawyers have sharply criticized the action as unlawful. “Labeling someone a terrorist and deploying the military does not make them a military target,” said Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “These actions amount to an extra-judicial killing, a violation of international law, which should raise extraordinary concerns.”
Wells Dixon, a senior attorney with the same organization, said: “Using military forces to kill alleged drug traffickers is an act of murder, not war.” Civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis called the killings “extra-judicial assassinations—a preemptive death penalty with no process—for vague alleged nonviolent drug distribution offenses.”
The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a policy organization focused on human rights, warned in a statement: “What we have seen so far suggests that the U.S. armed forces did something that it has never done, to our knowledge, in more than 35 years of military involvement in drug interdiction in the Caribbean Sea: an instant escalation to disproportionate lethal force against a civilian vessel without any apparent self-defense justification.” The group added, “Mere suspicion of carrying drugs, or merely being pursued by (much faster) naval vessels or other military assets in international waters, are not offenses that carry a death sentence, much less summary execution.”
Members of Congress have also spoken out forcefully. “Congress has not declared war on Venezuela, or Tren de Aragua, and the mere designation of a group as a terrorist organization does not give any president carte blanche,” said Representative Ilhan Omar. “It appears that US forces that were recently sent to the region in an escalatory and provocative manner were under no threat from the boat they attacked. There is no conceivable legal justification for this use of force. Unless compelling evidence emerges that they were acting in self-defense, that makes the strike a clear violation of international law.” Omar further criticized the administration for weaponizing the failed War on Drugs, saying it “has caused immeasurable damage across our hemisphere. It has led to massive forced displacement, environmental devastation, violence, and human rights violations. What it has not done is any damage whatsoever to narcotrafficking or to the cartels. It has been a dramatic, profound failure at every level.”
Representative Delia Ramirez added her own condemnation: “Trump and the Pentagon executed 11 people in the Caribbean, 1,500 miles away from the United States, without a legal rationale.” She argued that the president’s actions erode the rule of law and constitutional boundaries, writing, “Presidents don’t bomb first and ask questions later. Wannabe dictators do that.”
The strike comes amid a broader pattern of aggressive moves by the Trump administration toward Venezuela. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order designating Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization. Soon after, he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport more than 250 Venezuelans from the United States to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. Many of those deported had no criminal convictions. A soccer coach, a makeup artist, and a musician were among those sent to CECOT, where they later reported enduring physical and psychological torture. They were returned to Venezuela four months later in a prisoner swap.
The use of the Alien Enemies Act to justify deportations was struck down just hours after the Caribbean strike. On September 2, a federal appeals court ruled that the administration could not invoke the centuries-old law to expedite removals of alleged Tren de Aragua members. The court noted that the statute had only been used three times before in U.S. history—during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II, including to justify the internment of Japanese Americans.
While the administration has sought to frame the Caribbean attack as an act of national defense, experts warn that it breaks with decades of U.S. maritime practice, which relies on the Coast Guard to interdict suspected narcotics traffickers. Instead, the Trump administration ordered the immediate destruction of a civilian vessel in international waters, without offering clear evidence that those aboard posed an imminent threat.
As Omar and Ramirez press for accountability and rights organizations warn of dangerous precedent, the administration must still deliver its formal legal rationale to Congress. Until then, questions remain about how 11 people were identified, targeted, and killed without trial—and what this means for the limits of U.S. power on the high seas.
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