WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s decision to label alleged drug-runners in the Caribbean as “narco-terrorists” has spurred fresh debate over the legality of his strategy — and prompted speculation he could step up other controversial efforts to pursue enemies at home.
Trump’s team has dismissed criticism of the killings this month, saying they targeted people who posed an immediate and existential threat to Americans. After releasing video of two strikes in the last couple weeks, he said the military had “knocked off” a third boat as well.
Little information was provided about the purported third strike, but the White House previously released video of the first two strikes, one that killed 11 people and the second resulting in three deaths. The circumstances of those strikes were still unclear and questions lingered about the true threat posed to the U.S.
“These Presidentially directed strikes were conducted against the operations of a designated terrorist organization and were taken in defense of vital U.S. national interests and in the collective self-defense of other nations,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement.
That justification has run into skepticism from some members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, as well as legal experts.
The administration has been laying the groundwork for these actions for months, beginning with the designation of Latin American drug cartels and gangs as foreign terrorist organizations, according to scholars.
“Simply waving around words like ‘terrorist’ or ‘self-defense’ doesn’t change the legal reality — this is an extra-judicial killing under international law,” said Rebecca Ingber, a professor and expert in international law at the Cardozo School of Law.
Trump’s administration has said the campaign will be open-ended. The president notified Congress on Sept. 4 of the initial strike and said more could follow. “It is not possible at this time to know the full scope and duration of military operations that will be necessary,” the president wrote.
Arguments about presidential powers and the rights of the accused miss the point because they ignore the risk illicit drugs pose to the American public, said Hudson Institute President John Walters, who led the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy during the George W. Bush administration.
“It’s no longer a policing action,” Walters said. “This is now a matter of national security. The threat has reached that level. The president has designated it as such, and lethal force can be applied by military forces against this threat to protect American lives.”
In a statement Monday, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, called the president’s actions “an outrageous violation of the law and a dangerous assault on our Constitution.”
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky challenged the administration’s reasoning in a series of social media posts. He said the U.S. has the right to self-defense, but argued that right is not triggered by “a speedboat 2700 miles from the U.S. alleged to have drugs” and not attacking U.S. vessels.
In the same week that the House voted to repeal the 1991 and 2002 war authorizations that enabled U.S. military operations in Iraq, some say the president is employing the expansive “war on terror” concept closer to home.
That includes the administration’s repeated claims in the wake of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, including from Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, that the Democratic Party is a “domestic extremist organization.” After Kirk’s death, he has said left-wing political organizations were a “vast domestic terror movement,” and said Trump would order the Department of Justice to investigate “who is paying for it.”
Brian Finucane, senior adviser with the U.S. program at the International Crisis Group, said attempts by the White House and the president’s political allies to depict the terrorism designation as empowering him to use lethal force against those criminal entities were incorrect.
“Although the U.S. president is using the trappings and tools of military counter-terrorism, this is not actually counter-terrorism,” said Finucane, a former State Department lawyer. “This is the premeditated killing of people outside of armed conflict.”
‘Scrutiny by Congress’
The strikes should be viewed in the context of the administration “framing its domestic political opponents as terrorists and immigrants in the United States generally as terrorists,” said Finucane.
Others note that the president has broad latitude in matters of national security, and that ultimately the Supreme Court and Congress may have to become involved.
“If the President of the United States feels that it’s necessary to defend American citizens, he’s given usually the exception until there’s scrutiny by Congress,” said Brent Sadler, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation who specializes in naval warfare and advanced technology.
Sadler, a retired naval officer, echoed Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s argument that past approaches have not stemmed the flow of drugs to the U.S. and said the administration could justify its actions on the grounds of preemption, for which the legal bar is lower.
In congressional testimony this week, FBI Director Kash Patel drew a direct line between the U.S. war on terror after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the pursuit of Venezuelan drug traffickers.
“We must treat them like the foreign terrorist organizations post 9/11,” Patel said. “We must treat them like the al-Qaidas of the world, because that’s how they’re operating. And just treating them with law enforcement capabilities alone was wholly insufficient to wipe out the targets in their entirety.”
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