All posts tagged "Drug Trafficking"

Despite bombing small boats, Trump's aggressive military operations outside South America have made zero progress towards stopping the flow of cocaine, according to reporting by The New York Times.

Nine months ago, the Trump administration started attacking dozens of small boats, killing nearly 200 people in the process. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth touted the strikes as "highly effective" at stopping drug trafficking into the United States.

However, epidemiologists, addiction scientists, and public health experts are saying that cocaine is just as easy to get in the United States as it was before those strikes began, according to the Times. ...

The Justice Department has launched an investigation into Colombian President Gustavo Petro, purportedly over his alleged ties to drug traffickers, The New York Times reported on Friday.

The U.S. attorney's offices in Manhattan and Brooklyn are investigating Petro, an adversary of President Donald Trump, and have included agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and Homeland Security Investigations, three sources told The Times. The prosecutors leading the investigation have previously worked on international narcotics trafficking cases.

Investigators were in the early stages of examining whether Petro had met with drug traffickers and if he had received campaign donations from them, according to the anonymous sources who said they could not disclose the information surrounding the active investigations....

One former assistant U.S. attorney is arguing that President Donald Trump's pardon of a convicted drug trafficker doesn't jibe with his stated reason for blowing up boats in the Caribbean Sea.

During a Monday segment on MS NOW, Sean Murphy — who was a Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutor during former President Joe Biden's administration — told host Katy Tur that he was unable to make sense of Trump's recent pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, and his ongoing strikes on boats his administration alleges are trafficking drugs to the United States.

"It's very Orwellian, even the way that he says both, 'I'm going to go after drug traffickers and address this drug problem, but then pardon someone who is literally at the top of these drug trafficking activities,'" Murphy said. "He's killing people who are the lowest-level offenders without any evidence that they even know what's on their boat ... But here he's issuing this pardon."...

President Donald Trump announced he has pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who is serving a 45-year sentence in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking.

Trump wrote in a Friday post to his Truth Social platform that he was endorsing Nasry "Tito" Asfura in Sunday's presidential election in Honduras, and that his administration would be "very supportive" of Asfura's government if he won. He then pivoted to his decision that he would be "granting a Full and Complete Pardon" to Hernández, saying he had been "treated very harshly and unfairly."

"VOTE FOR TITO ASFURA FOR PRESIDENT, AND CONGRATULATIONS TO JUAN ORLANDO HERNANDEZ ON YOUR UPCOMING PARDON," Trump wrote in his signature all-caps style....

Suspected Mexican drug kingpin Juan Juarez Orosco has been extradited to the United States from Panama and arraigned in a federal New York court, authorities said Wednesday.

A US court sentenced the leader of Mexico's Juarez cartel, who allegedly admitted a role in over 1,500 murders, to life in prison Thursday on drug trafficking and racketeering charges.