A legal expert says that President Donald Trump's promise "should be a wake-up call" as the combined death toll on alleged drug cartel boats has now reached 27 people, and questions are swirling over the "morally abominable acts."
Brett Max Kaufman, senior counsel at the The American Civil Liberties Union, wrote an opinion piece on Wednesday for MSNBC detailing how the Trump administration could be killing potentially innocent people — not necessarily drug cartels — and that "there is no credible factual or legal argument that the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with any drug cartel under international law."
This is problematic for a number of reasons, Kaufman argues.
"The Trump administration has promised even more to come, but we already know enough about these strikes to call them what they are: extrajudicial killings that are flagrantly illegal under both domestic and international law," he writes.
"Notably, the president has not asked Congress for any authorization for use of force or declaration of war," Kaufman writes.
Kaufman urges Americans to push back on the Trump administration's latest moves.
"Congress, the courts and the American people must bring an end to the executive branch’s ever-more-capacious and unilateral expansions of authority to use lethal force abroad," Kaufman writes. "Over the past 25 years, administrations of both parties have pushed aggressive theories of executive power by expansively interpreting the executive branch’s Article II and statutory powers. In areas of foreign affairs and national security in particular, the courts have for too long excessively deferred to the office of the president. The institutions with the power to check these activities should step up to actually do so. A decades-long one-way ratchet of executive power helped produce Trump’s latest legally and morally abominable acts, and these strikes should be a wake-up call to all."
Trump Wednesday indicated during a press conference that the United States would consider strikes on land in Venezuela. His administration secretly authorized the CIA's covert action in the country and an "intensifying pressure campaign against Venezuela" and its authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro, The New York Times reports.