War on Drugs

Jacob Sullum | 1.2.2026 5:10 PM

On September 2, President Donald Trump gleefully announced that he had ordered a "kinetic strike" on a speedboat "transporting illegal narcotics," killing 11 men he described as "positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists." That SEAL Team Six operation became newly controversial a few months later because it included a follow-up missile strike that obliterated two defenseless survivors of the initial attack as they clung to the smoldering wreckage. But even before that revelation, it was clear that the attack marked an alarming escalation of the war on drugs.

The September 2 operation inaugurated a deadly military campaign against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific that so far has killed 115 people in 35 attacks. This new anti-drug strategy treats cocaine couriers as "combatants" who can be killed at will, from a distance and in cold blood, rather than criminal suspects subject to arrest and prosecution. Yet remnants of the latter approach persist, creating contradictions that underline the illogic, immorality, and lawlessness of the murderous methods that Trump prefers.

The U.S. Coast Guard is still intercepting boats suspected of carrying illegal drugs, as it did for decades before Trump deemed that strategy insufficiently violent. Between September 1 and........

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