US military forces have caught another suspected drug smuggling ship in the Caribbean, destroying the ship and killing all six on board.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the move in a social media post stating that his department had carried out what he called a “lethal kinetic attack” on the ship, which he claimed had been operated by members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
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He also said that all six people on board had died in the attack, referring to them as “terrorists” in line with the Trump administration’s designation of the Aragua Train as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
“If you are a narcoterrorist smuggling drugs into our hemisphere, we will treat you like we treat Al Qaeda. Day or night, we will map your networks, track your people, hunt you down and kill you,” Hegseth added.
Hegseth’s announcement brings to more than 40 the death toll in the Trump administration’s weeks-long campaign against suspected drug traffickers in multiple attacks in both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.
The latest attack comes just a day after the Pentagon chief revealed a pair of attacks that killed a total of five people: an attack on a ship off the coast of Colombia that killed two, and another on Wednesday that killed three more.
As of Friday, there have been ten US attacks on suspected drug smuggling vessels by military forces in what the Trump administration has described as a war against foreign drug cartels.
Critics have argued that the campaign amounts to illegal extrajudicial killings, while members of Congress and civil rights groups are pressing the administration for evidence and legal memoranda shared among White House officials to justify the attacks.
So far, the administration has been unwilling to share the intelligence used to select which ships have been attacked or the legal justification behind the attacks. And although the government continues to describe those killed as “terrorists,” two who survived a recent attack in the Caribbean were repatriated to their home countries rather than detained.
The apparent repatriation of people labeled “terrorists” by the government – rather than face prosecution in the United States – also raises additional legal questions about the operations, including whether survivors should be treated as wartime detainees or transferred to military or criminal authorities for processing.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro said a U.S. attack in September targeted a civilian ship in distress — not a drug trafficking vessel — and accused Trump of “murder.”
Trump, in his Social Truth, called Petro “an illegal drug kingpin” and accused his government of “swindling” American aid.
Most of the cocaine smuggled into the United States arrives from the Pacific Ocean, but the Trump administration largely focused its attacks off the coasts of Venezuela and the Caribbean in an apparent military campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
While the Trump administration has declared that the United States is engaged in what it calls an “armed conflict” with drug cartels that President Donald Trump has called “unlawful combatants” – an invocation of wartime authority to justify the use of force – Trump has said he will not ask Congress to greenlight his actions despite clear provisions in the US Constitution that reserve the power to declare war to the ruling legislative.
At a White House roundtable on anti-drug efforts on Thursday, Trump ruled out calling for a declaration of war or authorization for the use of military force against cartels or the South American governments he says are responsible for supporting the cartels.
“I don’t think we’re necessarily going to call for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill the people who are bringing drugs into our country, okay? We’re going to kill them,” Trump said.
Alex Woodward contributed to this report from New York.