The Daily - The U.S. Keeps Killing Venezuelans on Boats. Is That Legal?

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

The U.S. military has blown up three boats in the Caribbean Sea in the past three weeks, killing 17 people aboard.Each time, President Trump has claimed that the boats were carrying drugs to the United States and that those killed were “narcoterrorists.” But he has offered no concrete evidence to back up this claim.Charlie Savage, who covers national security for The New York Times, tells us what he has learned about what may be the true objective behind these airstrikes and whether any of this is even legal.Guest: Charlie Savage, who writes about national security and legal policy for The New York Times.Background reading: Last week, Mr. Trump said the U.S. military had attacked a third boat suspected of carrying drugs, killing three.He has claimed the power to kill those suspected of drug smuggling.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Elizabeth Frantz for The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittrow-F. This is the Daily. One by one over the past few weeks, three boats in the Caribbean Sea have been blown up by the U.S. military, killing all 17 people aboard. Each time, President Trump has claimed that the boats were carrying drugs to the U.S. and that those killed were narco-terrorists. But he's offered no concrete evidence to back up that claim. Today, my colleague Charlie Savage on what he's learned

about what may be the true objective behind these airstrikes and whether any of this is even legal. It's Thursday, September 25th. Charlie, it's great to have you. Thanks for having me on. We've come to you to talk about what's been happening off the coast of Venezuela over the past month. We've now seen three separate U.S. military strikes on boats that American officials say we're carrying drugs. And those strikes have come after Trump has been building up a military press.

in the Caribbean Sea for weeks now. You cover national security. So help us understand what's going on here. President Trump and the Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth have ordered military special operations forces in the Caribbean to attack boats in international waters, at least for now, that are suspected of smuggling drugs for certain cartels and gangs that Trump has controversially designated as terrorist organizations. And this is a fundamental shift in how the United States has been dealing for years and years with the problem of drug smuggling coming out of Latin America across the water towards the United States. In a really dramatic and legally disputed shift, the United States is claiming a right

to summarily kill everyone on a boat. it suspects of drug running in international waters, to essentially treat the issue of drug smuggling as if it's an armed attack on the United States and to kill people suspected of participating in that activity as if they were combatants on a battlefield in a war. Safe to say, these are extraordinary and unprecedented moves. Absolutely. There's been pushing and tugging on the laws

around armed conflict and the use of force in the 21st century because of the war on terrorism and the notion of a war against a non-state actor like al-Qaeda. But this is fundamentally different than that. This is treating people who are civilians, even if they are suspected of being criminals, as if they were combatants and killing them without any kind of due process.

Okay, so take me to the beginning of this story. Where does all this start? Well, for me and my colleagues like Killeen Cooper and Eric Schmidt, who cover the Pentagon, and Julian Barnes also covers intelligence. We've all been working on this a lot together. It starts in August when we picked up chatter and were able to confirm that Trump had secretly signed an order in late July directing the military to use military force, that is to target with lethal force, suspected drug smugglers from groups that his administration had designated as terrorists. Normally, when Trump does something like that, he touts it, he puts it up on the internet, he signs it with the flourish in front of cameras. It was very unusual that this was happening

without any publicity. And so throughout August, we were watching as, number one, an enormous amount of naval firepower was moved into the South Caribbean Sea. And as the Trump administration ratcheted up its rhetorical attacks on Venezuela's government, its strongman president, Nicholas Maduro, they kept calling him a cartel leader, illegitimate, et cetera, suggesting the focus was going to be Venezuelan. And indeed, on September 2nd, Trump is talking to some reporters in the Oval Office when he suddenly says, We just, over the last few minutes, literally shot out a boat, a drug-carrying boat, a lot of drugs in that boat. That just that same day, the United States had conducted a military strike on a boat.

Came out of Venezuela and coming out very heavily from Venezuela. A lot of things are coming out of Venezuela. And that we would be hearing more about that. And soon after, on his social media platform, he posted. A description of this strike said he killed 11 people who were aboard the vessel, which he said was smuggling drugs on behalf of the Trend de Aragua Venezuelan gang, which he had designated as terrorists. And there was a video from different views of aerial surveillance showing a boat on water, not clear exactly who or what is on board. And then it explodes. And the scale of the death, 11 people, was also very striking because a boat that is smuggling cargo, one of these sort of go-fast boats, does not need a crew of 11.

That just takes up space. You could put more drugs on the boat if that's indeed what was happening. And so it also immediately raised questions about who was actually on this boat, how good the intelligence was. Was there some human trafficking going on too? some migrants or something on the boat who had nothing to do with drugs and were also now killed. But it was clear at that point that this secret order we had written about and this buildup of forces in the Caribbean Sea had now been used for the first time. Charlie, it sounds like, one, this was a remarkable moment.

And two, that you were actually skeptical that this was even. a drug boat. It wasn't clear based on the evidence. Well, there was no evidence. There was just an assertion. And then there was this oddity of why are there so many people on this boat. And there was immediately a reaction among experts in the law of armed conflict, retired senior judge advocate general officers who used to be in charge of telling the military where the limits lay and what was permissible in terms of using force. And a hallmark of the entire ethos is you do not deliberately target civilians, even criminal suspects, unless they are directly participating in hostilities. And the Trump administration has not put out a detailed legal rationale for how this isn't

just murder. They've gestured at the outlines of a rationale. What have they said exactly, Charlie, about the rationale behind this. They have said that at a time in which 100,000 Americans a year die from drug overdoses, Trump has the authority to lawfully decide that the criminal problem of drug smuggling and drug trafficking is essentially an armed attack on the United States, but the United States can use military force in self-defense. against drug trafficking, and that therefore he has constitutional authority to kill these people. The argument is that these drug trafficking groups are threatening Americans, are killing Americans

with the drugs that they smuggle into the United States, and that that is enough to declare them terrorists. At this point, all we have is, for the first attack, especially in September 2nd, is President Trump's assertion that the intelligence was confident that this boat was carrying drugs that would eventually be bound for the United States. Further complicating that is just because if there are drugs on a boat, just because they're leaving one country down there doesn't necessarily mean they're bound for here. It looked like it was going to Trindad in Tobago from Venezuela, and that's often a transshipment point to Europe.

In any case, all we have is Trump saying we have recordings. we know it was on the boat. Take our word for it, basically. Take our word for it. And then it turns out that the video he released, which shows a boat moving in the water and then blown apart, is not the whole story because it was edited. And the people who have been briefed on the unedited video say

that, number one, the boat had turned around before the United States military attacked it. It had apparently seen. an aircraft kind of stalking it and gotten freaked out, whoever was piloting the boat, and turned around and was pointed back towards Venezuela. And two, it didn't just take one strike to settle the matter. Even after the first strike disabled the boat, they struck it several more times to make it sink. And you're saying the boat was actually facing away from the United States when those strikes happen.

that's apparently what the unedited surveillance video shows and there was such controversy surrounding this thing the U.S. military had done that it wasn't clear whether this was going to be a one-off or they were going to keep going. But then last week, Trump announced a second and then a third strike on two more boats. Each time in those cases he said they had killed three people aboard each of those vessels. So we know it's not a one-off. It's now something of a pattern. That's right. And we actually know less about them in some respects. In the second attack, Trump said that it was Venezuelans aboard, didn't identify a particular

organization. Third attacked, he didn't even give a nationality for who was aboard or identify a particular cartel or gang, he said, was behind the smuggling. We do know that they have said each of these attacks so far has taken. place in international waters, and the third attack took place off the coast of the Dominican Republic. And interestingly, the Dominican Republic forces went out to the site of the attack over the weekend and have said that they were able to recover some floating bales of what appear to be drugs, and they released some photographs of that. And that's the first evidence we have that there was, in fact, drugs on board, apparently at least one of these vessels.

The point is, in each of these cases, the Trump administration is not giving us enough information to independently assess really what happened. If we are to take them at their word for a moment, that these were drug traffickers smuggling a bunch of drugs into the U.S., can the U.S. military just shoot boats like this out of the water? Is that allowed? not under any traditional understanding of how constraints both in domestic law and international law and the use of force works any more than a police officer who sees someone he thinks is dealing drugs on a street corner can just pull out his gun and shoot the person dead drug smuggling is a crime a serious crime but it is dealt with as a law enforcement measure and for many years the way United States and other countries have dealt with the problem of drug smuggling in the Caribbean Sea and elsewhere is that the U.S. Coast Guard with assistance from the U.S. Navy interdicts these boats, boards them, searches them. It turns out the suspicions are accurate. It seizes the drugs and arrests the crew for prosecution.

And if it turns out the suspicions are not accurate, it lets the people go. It doesn't kill them on suspicion. Well, how is the Trump administration legally justifying this then? Like, within the general outlines of the rationale that you mentioned, what's the legal basis that they're using to say, you know, this is okay, this is permissible? Traditionally, an administration doing something this edgy and novel would seek to justify itself by putting out a long legal memo, probably written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. and you may or may not agree with it,

but at least you would have something to talk about. You could sink your teeth into it, and people could say, well, this is where they're really pushing it, and we disagree, but there would still be something there. In this case, they haven't really put out anything like that. There's some straight comments and a terse statement that White House put out a couple sentences of after people like me pushed them to say something.

And so we are sort of left to fill in the blanks for them, and their argument seems to hinge on the idea that they can expand who counts as a terrorist and expand what a government can do to someone it has deemed a terrorist. We'll be right back. You said, Charlie, that the Trump administration's justification for the strikes, hinges, in part on the administration defining drug traffickers as terrorists. Are they terrorists? Like, what's the definition of a terrorist? So in everyday language, a terrorist group is an organization that is using violence to advance.

some kind of ideological, religious, political goal. They're trying to coerce a government into changing its policy. They're trying to overturn a government and replace it with something new. They're trying to intimidate a population into changing its attitude towards something. And because that seems so insidious and sort of different than ordinary crime, it is treated differently by the law. And one of the ways it's different is that Congress has empowered the executive branch to designate foreign organizations as terrorists' organizations. And so the precursor to this eruption of violence in the Caribbean Sea is that several months ago, after the Trump II administration came into office, it began designating drug cartels and

Latin American gangs as foreign terrorist organizations. And that had never been done before. Right. Because these are not groups that are motivated by religion or politics. They are groups that are motivated by the pursuit of illicit profit. Right. I remember I was in Mexico at the time as a foreign correspondent. And this was major news for the cartels in the region. They were all trying to suss out what this meant, what it meant that they were now being compared to suicide bombers. Well, it's a major escalation. And these are not what we think of as terrorists. And they're not actually trying to kill Americans with their products, even though that clearly does happen, especially with fentanyl. They want people to keep buying their product, and therefore they don't prefer to kill them. That is not to say that these are good people. These are obviously not moral, upstanding people who are making positive contributions to human society. Right. And their motivation is also not to change policy. It's not to change a government. It's not ideological. But Trump, once he's declared them terrorists, whether that fits the traditional definition or not, can he order them to be killed by the military at that point? No. And this is part of what is fundamentally a disconnect here with the extent to which the administration has offered any kind of legal theory. They have suggested that the act by the executive branch of designating an organization as a foreign terrorist group brings with it legal authority to attack that group militarily. And it's just not true as a description of legal reality. That authority is limited to imposing economic

freezing accounts, making it a crime to provide material support to such an organization. It does not come with the authority to attack them as if it were a war. And I think it's worth pausing here to recall, since we've had 25 years of a war on terror now, what that really is, which is that after 9-11, Congress enacted a broad authorization for the use of military force against essentially al-Qaeda in countries that harbored al-Qaeda, which meant the Taliban in Afghanistan. And that therefore meant the United States

was engaged in an armed conflict with a particular group of terrorists, not all terrorists everywhere in the world, but al-Qaeda. And in the years since then, the war on al-Qaeda has expanded as the original al-Qaeda has splintered and morphed

and moved around the world to failed states like Somalia and rural Yemen and groups like what we now call the Islamic State, that use of military force to target them for death has continued because there is a congressionally authorized war against this particular group of terrorists. But that doesn't mean that the executive branch has open-ended authority to kill people. it deems any kind of terrorist anywhere in the world it might find them. It doesn't even mean that the executive branch could kill al-Qaeda suspects in a place like Paris or London where there's a police force that could arrest them.

There's constraints on the use of armed force, both as a matter of domestic and international law, that are not overcome by the executive branch saying, we're going to designate this group as a foreign terrorist organization. Given that, what we're seeing here off the coast of Venezuela sounds pretty far away from being legal. I have been struck by how widespread the alarm for what is happening is among the various spectrum of people who pay attention to the laws of armed conflict. We've had 20 years of arguments over the war on al-Qaeda,

and all of those people, from the left to the right, from the dovish to the hawkish, are agreed, as far as I can tell, that this has crossed a line. And it's not just something that Trump is doing on his own, but he and Pete Hegeseth are causing the troops, American troops, under their command, to cross this line themselves. So does this then get, challenged? How does it get challenged? Whose job is it to do something about the illegality of these

strikes? If these strikes are illegal, you know, we don't have a court ruling that says that. I'm just describing the conversation outside the government. Sure. It's difficult to see a forum where this gets cleanly adjudicated. The most obvious place as a matter of international law would be the the International Criminal Court in the Hague, which notably right now is prosecuting the former president of the Philippines for crimes against humanity and murder for his war on drugs, which included gunning down people in the street who were suspected to being drug dealers. But the United States has not joined the international criminal court, and so there's probably not ever going to be jurisdiction there. And the legal experts I've spoken to all think it's

incredibly unlikely that domestically soldiers would ever be prosecuted for obeying the president's orders. And thanks to the Supreme Court last year, the president now, of course, has immunity for his official actions. And so I don't think there's going to be a lawsuit or a prosecution anywhere that will give us a definitive answer. I think what we're talking about more is just a political reaction and just a thought of, you know, what does this mean for the soldiers under the command of these people who are executing these orders to say nothing of what does this mean for people on boats in the Caribbean? Yeah, you're painting a very complicated road to any potential accountability here.

But what about Congress? I mean, they have the oversight role here. Can they do anything? Theoretically, yes. If there were political will, And that's a huge question right now, obviously. Under the war powers resolution, which is a Vietnam-era law that gives Congress some tools, it could, for example, vote on a resolution directing the executive branch to end its military operation. And in fact, there is such a legislation being introduced right now by senators, Adam Schiff, and Tim Kane. You will notice that they are both Democrats, and there's not a majority of Democrats in either. the House or the Senate right now. And Trump could veto such a resolution directing him to end the

operation. So you would need two-thirds majorities in both chambers. Not likely to happen. The flip side is, one of the things we learned last week is that there is a slightly mysterious draft bill that is circulating within the executive branch and within Congress that would authorize use of armed force against groups that Trump deems to be narco-terrorists. And it's interesting that that's floating around. And whether it could, in fact, pass Congress to at least legalize this as a matter of domestic law is questionable in a period in which there's a lot of fatigue over the forever war, open-ended war on terror. Is this draft bill you're describing basically an authorization for a war on narco-terror similar to the post-9-11 war on terror in the

Middle East? Is that what we're looking at? This bill, yes. And, you know, we're so used to thinking about the war on drugs going back to the 80s as this sort of metaphor. And so, yes, this would be a literal war on groups and people that Trump deems to be narco-terrorists and countries he deems to have harbored or aided them. And so to the extent that all this military hardware in the Caribbean and the discussion of cartels as terrorists also seems to be pointed at Nicholas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, who the Trump administration very clearly would like to see not in power. Well, let's talk about Venezuela and what the Maduro regime has to do with all of this. Because you hear the Trump administration saying this is about fighting drug trafficking, but Venezuela is not a major source of fentanyl coming into the United States.

So what's this about? Why the focus on Venezuela right now? Yes, I think that is perhaps the most important question in trying to make sense of all this from the outside. And to really start to peel it back, I think we have to go back in time a couple months before this military operation started to really see how focused Trump and people like Marco Rubio around him are on Maduro and Venezuela in particular. Right after Trump comes into power, your listeners may remember there was a giant controversy. over the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th century wartime deportation law that allows the government to summarily remove people who are citizens of a country that we are at war with or that is invading us. And Trump tried to, in fact, successfully sent a couple plane loads full of Venezuelans to this notorious prison in El Salvador without giving them due process hearings under a claim

that he could do so under this law that had not been used since World War II. But as part of that, Trump declared in an official document that he signed that this Venezuelan gang that he had designated as terrorists, Tren de Aragua, was controlled by Maduro, was coming to the United States and committing crimes here at the direction of Maduro. Is there any evidence of that, Charlie? Right. So part of what's fascinating about that is that it turns out that the U.S. government does not believe that's true, that the intelligence community actually has produced memos, evaluating the available evidence, and thinks the opposite is true.

That this gang, for one thing, is not organized enough to pass on orders to anybody. It doesn't have a sort of central hierarchy command and control structure. But two, it's actually at odds with Maduro and Maduro forces or get into gunfights with them and so forth. And one of those memos was eventually declassified, and so we can see it. This is not just source reporting. And yet this is used as part of this broader campaign targeting Maduro and Venezuelans, the deportations in the U.S., and now these strikes, your say. Yes.

Notwithstanding all that, Trump continues to say this gang is, you know, being controlled by Maduro, keeps calling Maduro illegitimate and saying justice is coming, and the Justice Department doubles a reward for his capture. He was indicted in the first Trump administration. for drug trafficking. And then they move all these naval assets off the coast of Venezuela. And these are not things that you would really use to interdict or even blow up little boats that you think are carrying drugs. These are things that carry cruise missiles and thousands of Marines. You know, the obvious question is, are they thinking about something to remove Maduro

from power in Venezuela? Meaning what? Meaning capture? him, meaning regime change. Right. So we don't think they have enough troops there to go in and take over the country. Like a 1989 when the Bush administration invaded Panama to remove Noriega from power. But certainly you could see a capture operation or a lethal operation. We don't really know what we're looking at here. But it certainly is a striking buildup of force.

It's a striking amount of rhetoric. and now it's a striking use of force under this narco-terrorism rubric. It seems from everything you've said that what Trump is doing in ordering these strikes on these boats off the coast of Venezuela, it has a lot of audiences and potential objectives. They threaten the cartels on the one hand. They threaten Maduro on the other. They also send a message to all the people in the United States who are affected by drug. in one way or another, you know, by overdoses, that they are taking this seriously.

There's a way in which this policy really has some benefits for the Trump administration. I think absolutely that, you know, drug traffickers, suspected drug traffickers, are not at all a popular victim. And certainly a Maduro administration is not a group of people that elicits much sympathy. And to the extent that this is like we're getting tough with some visuals that play well on television. You can see the political attraction of it. But the details, like, are these people on this particular boat or that particular boat actually engaged in drug smuggling? Does fentanyl actually come from South America? Are also then standing alongside moral and abstract rule of law issues. Does Trump have the power to dissimarily kill people he,

says are suspected drug smugglers? Is this extrajudicial killings prohibited by laws against murder? Not even war crimes because there is no armed conflict. You need an armed conflict before you can have a war crime. And it points also to questions about what's coming next, not just in the South Caribbean Sea, but even closer to home. Because, I mean, this is a time in which Trump has been expanding his powers in all kinds of ways. And one of those big categories is his use of the military, not just what we're talking about here in international waters. He has sent troops under federal control into the streets of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and by all indications, intends to do more of that. And just this week claimed he was designating the Antifa movement

as a domestic terrorist organization, even though there is no law that allowed. the designation of domestic groups as terrorist organizations for First Amendment reasons. And even though Antifa is not really an organization, it's just an idea or a stance or a protest style. And so all kinds of lines that seem like they exist. You don't use troops inside the United States for police functions. You can't designate a domestic movement as a terrorist organization are getting crossed. And so what's the next line? What you're pointing to is the fact

that what Trump has already been doing has pushed the bounds of what's normal in terms of the use of U.S. military forces, both abroad and at home, and that these strikes may lead to another slippery slope on what becomes permissible. Well, I think the very idea of what's permissible and normal, to use your word, right now is all open to question.

This is an administration that is unlike any we've seen before, including the Trump One administration. It is demonstrably feeling radically unconstrained by limitations that previous presidents and AIDS felt some need to adhere to. And so we are eight months into a situation in which where all this is going remains very much open to question. Charlie, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, a shooter opened fire on a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Facility in Dallas, killing one detainee and critically wounding two others. The gunman died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Officials said he left behind ammunition, bearing the phrase anti-ice, blue writing, and that the attack had targeted immigration enforcement agents. But investigators didn't release many details about the shooter or his motives, and no law enforcement agents were harmed in the attack.

Violence is wrong. Politically motivated violence is wrong. At a news conference after the shooting, Texas Senator Ted Cruz called for an end to acts of political violence. To every politician who is used. using rhetoric, demonizing ICE and demonizing CBP, stop. And cast blame on harsh rhetoric attacking federal immigration agents. Because here's what happens when Democrats, like Gavin Newsom did, say that these people are

part of an authoritarian government. Speaking at an event in North Carolina, Vice President J.D. Vance accused Democrats like California Governor Gavin Newsom of encouraging violent acts against. ICE. If your political rhetoric encourages violence against our law enforcement, you can go straight to hell and you have no place in the political conversation of the United States. On social media, President Trump vowed to crack down on what he called deranged radical leftists and promised to sign an executive order to dismantle these domestic terrorism

networks. Today's episode was produced by Carlos Prieto and Olivia Nat. It was edited by Chris Haxel and Paige Cowitt with help from Devin Taylor and Patricia Willens. Fact-checked by Susan Lee and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for the Daily. I'm Natalie Ketrow-F. See you tomorrow. Thank you.