Trump previously told Fox News, “We take them out,” and later joked about how people, most of them desperately poor, are now afraid to fish along certain coastlines.
Without releasing credible evidence, Trump claims the victims’ vessels were “stacked up with bags of white powder that’s mostly fentanyl and other drugs, too.”
Trump says they were “smuggling a deadly weapon poisoning Americans,” on behalf of various “terrorist organizations.”
Trump is calling the victims terrorists so that he can treat them as enemy combatants in a war that does not exist, just as he is doing at home. Domestically, we know Trump calls groups who oppose him politically “domestic terrorists.” We know he fabricated a domestic terrorist organization he calls “Antifa” to sell his plan for violence. We also know his administration is lying about peaceful protestors threatening ICE agents in order to justify ICE brutality, and that ICE refuses to wear body cams without a court order.
Trump’s firehose of lies about domestic ‘terrorists’ won’t help his claims about ‘terrorists’ on the high seas.
Is Trump confusing South America with China and Mexico?
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has credibly accused Trump of murder. In response, instead of offering legal justification, Trump said he was cutting off foreign aid to Colombia, seemingly confusing that nation with Democratic-run states from whom he is also illegally withholding funds.
Bragging about the killings, Trump falsely claimed that every exploded shipping vessel “saves 25,000 American lives.”
In the factual world, about 100,000 Americans die each year from drug overdoses, mostly by fentanyl, which does not come from Venezuela, Colombia or any South American country.
The fentanyl killing Americans comes from labs in Mexico and China. Given his difficulty with geography, Trump may not know the difference. At any rate, South America produces marijuana and cocaine, not fentanyl. Most of the killing fentanyl is smuggled into the country by US citizens, over land.
Legal arguments don’t hold water
The White House claims the strikes are a matter of self-defense. To get there, Trump “determined” that drug cartels like Tren de Aragua are “terrorists.” But officials say Tren de Aragua is not operating in the shipping routes under attack, and that the route Trump and Hegseth are targeting carries cocaine and marijuana to Europe and Africa, not the US.
Legal experts on the use of armed force say Trump’s campaign is illegal because the military is not permitted to target civilians who are not directly participating in hostilities. Key legal instruments prohibiting extrajudicial killings and murder include the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Statute of the International Criminal Court, and customary international humanitarian law. The Trump administration has not publicly offered a legal theory that comports with any of these laws.
Instead, the White House has argued that the attacks fall under the law of armed conflict (LOAC), which limits methods of warfare and sets out legally required protections for noncombatants and civilians during conflict. The US is in no such conflict; we are not under attack in the US or anywhere else, and Congress has declared no war.
Designating drug cartels as “terrorist organizations” is also factually suspect. Drug cartels exist for profit; all purveyors of illicit drugs are in the business to make money. In contrast, “terrorists” by definition are motivated by ideological goals often involving politics or religion—not profit. Even if they were terrorists, international law would only allow the executive branch to respond through legal methods like freezing assets, trials and imprisonment.
Hegseth and others will face court martial
Trump and Hegseth’s legal arguments have been universally rejected by military legal experts including former lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, who have condemned the attacks as unlawful under both domestic and international law. Nevertheless, Hegseth has stated enthusiastically that the military will continue these executions.
In February, Hegseth fired the JAGs whose job was to assess the legality of military actions. He may have deliberately done so to engage in illegal conduct and later claim a “mistake of law” defense, but that maneuver won’t save him. In US Servicemembers’ Exposure to Criminal Liability for Lethal Strikes on Narcoterrorists, Just Security lays it out under the Manual for Courts-Martial, and Article 118 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), concluding in the Venezuela strikes that:
Despite the clear absence of an “imminent threat of death or serious injury” or “grave threat to life,” the U.S. Coast Guard did not interdict the alleged criminal narcotrafficking in the way this conduct has been historically (and recently) approached.
These suspected criminals were not arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced through a regular course of criminal procedure and neutral adjudication in a court. They were killed extrajudicially for conduct that could not be plausibly labeled a military attack, use of force, or even threat of imminent harm to anyone in the United States or any other nation, and despite the opportunity and ability to use less-than-lethal force to stop the boats.
An extrajudicial killing, premeditated and without justification or excuse and without the legal authority tied to an armed conflict, is properly called “murder.” And murder is still a crime for those in uniform who executed the strike even if their targets are dangerous criminals, and even if servicemembers were commanded to do so by their superiors, including the President of the United States.
Under this analysis, “every officer in the chain of command who … directed downward the initial order from the President or Secretary of Defense” would likely fall within the meaning of traditional accomplice liability, and could be charged for murder under Article 118.
Even if a corrupt Supreme Court gave Trump criminal immunity for murder (an unsettled question), someone should let Hegseth know that immunity does not extend to him, or to other service members piloting the drones or firing the missiles under orders that are obviously illegal.
- Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
