Days after the U.S. military destroyed a boat in the Caribbean that it claimed was being used to smuggle drugs, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the legal basis for the strike lay in the status of the traffickers as an “imminent threat” to the United States.
“A foreign terrorist organization poisoning your people with drugs coming from a drug cartel is no different than al-Qaida — and they’ll be treated as such, as they were in international waters,” Hegseth told reporters on Thursday.
President Donald Trump shared a video on Tuesday that showed the strike on the boat, which he said killed 11 members of Tren De Aragua, a criminal gang based in Venezuela, which the United States has designated as a foreign terrorist organization along with other drug cartels.
Trump wrote on Truth Social that the people aboard the boat were trying to smuggle drugs into the United States at the time of the strike.
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When asked on Thursday what legal authority the Defense Department invoked for the strike on the boat, Hegseth said that the U.S. military has the “absolute and complete authority” to carry out the attack, describing deaths caused by drugs as “an assault on the American people.”
“If you’re trafficking in drugs and you’re a known cartel entity, a designated terror organization, and you’re headed to the United States or are part of a process that would head to the United States, that will have lethal consequences,” Hegseth said while visiting Fort Benning in Georgia. “The poisoning of the American people is over.”
Hegseth declined to say exactly which drug cartels the U.S. military is targeting. He also would not say how the Defense Department determined the 11 people aboard the boat were trafficking narcotics.
“We knew exactly who they were, exactly what they were doing, what they represented, and why they were going where they were going,” Hegseth said, adding, “We have plenty of ways to determine how we know who is who.”
The U.S. military has sent a sizeable number of warships to the Caribbean near Venezuela, including the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima, the amphibious transport docks USS San Antonio and USS Fort Lauderdale, and roughly 4,500 Marines and sailors with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, who are embarked aboard the three ships.
Venezuela’s leader Nicolas Maduro has responded to the large U.S. naval presence by deploying troops to the country’s border with Colombia and encouraging Venezuelans to enlist in a civilian militia.
The Defense Department confirmed on Thursday that two Venezuelan military aircraft had flown over a U.S. Navy vessel in international waters. CBS reported that the two aircraft were armed Venezuelan F-16s, which had overflown the destroyer USS Jason Dunham in action that defense officials described as a “show of force.”
In a statement shared on X, the Defense Department described the move as “highly provocative,” claiming it was intended to interfere with the U.S. military’s ongoing counternarcotics operations. The Pentagon also issued a warning against any similar actions in the future.
On Thursday, Hegseth said that the strike on the boat in the Caribbean would be “just the beginning of what will happen” if drug cartels continue to try to smuggle narcotics into the United States.
“We smoked a drug boat, and there’s 11 narcoterrorists at the bottom of the ocean,” Hegseth said. “And when other people try to do that, they’re going to meet the same fate.”
