The president’s refusal comes as Democrats, other critics say strikes killing at least 83 people are unjustified and illegal ‘extrajudicial killings.’
Trump says strike killed 6 ‘narcoterrorists’
Presdient Trump says U.S. military strike killed 6 ‘narcoterrorists’ off Venezuela’s coast in boat strike.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is ramping up lethal strikes on alleged narcoterrorist drug boats as part of a broader pressure campaign against Venezuela, but the administration has not provided the public and Congress with its legal rationale for the attacks.
This week, those Senate Democrats escalated their demands that the Trump administration publicly disclose their legal justification for conducting the attacks as U.S. military assets gather in the waters off Venezuela, possibly for strikes on that country’s soil.
“Few decisions are more consequential for a democracy than the use of lethal force,” the 13 senators, all members of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, wrote in a Nov. 24 letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The 21 strikes have killed at least 83 people in recent months. Specifically, they are demanding that the Trump administration release a classified Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel written opinion from Sept. 5 on the lethal airstrikes in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean.
The Office of Legal Counsel, also known as OLC, opinion − reportedly drafted over the summer and first reported by The Washington Post on Nov. 12 − argues that U.S. military personnel engaged in lethal action in Latin America, including the boat strikes, cannot be prosecuted for it.
What’s unclear, though, is why the administration believes that is the case, and what legal justification it is using to make that determination.
“The declassification and public release of this important document would enhance transparency in the use of deadly force by our Nation’s military and is necessary to ensure Congress and the American people are fully informed of the legal justification supporting these strikes,” the senators wrote. They noted that such memos have been publicly released before.
Some former military and law enforcement officials and legal analysts say the strikes are illegal and amount to extrajudicial killings. That’s also the assessment of the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, who says the strikes “violate international human rights law.”
The debate is increasingly fraught as Trump has said the military or CIA may strike within Venezuela itself, and observers — seeing a U.S. military buildup near Venezuela — suspect an effort to topple Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is in the offing.
Six congressional Democrats, including Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, went so far as to air a video telling their former colleagues in the military and intelligence community that they should refuse to follow illegal orders, in a suspected reference to the Venezuela strikes. Trump, in response, accused the Democrats of making seditious claims that were “punishable by death.”
Why is the Trump administration conducting the strikes?
There is no U.S. law that explicitly authorizes the U.S. Navy to attack or sink ships at sea outside of a congressionally authorized war or valid self-defense situation, legal experts and Democratic lawmakers say.
The strikes began in September, but Trump administration discussions about them began soon after Trump moved back into the White House in January.
Emil Bove, at the time the acting deputy attorney general, told Justice Department prosecutors at a February legal conference that the drug boats leaving Venezuela should be attacked and sunk rather than interdicting them as has been the strategy for decades, a former senior Trump Justice Department counternarcotics official told USA TODAY. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential DOJ matters.
Trump has since appointed Bove, his former personal defense attorney, to a federal judgeship.
Trump campaigned on prioritizing fighting transnational drug cartels, especially those smuggling deadly fentanyl into the United States, where the powerful synthetic opioid has killed more than 250,000 Americans since 2021.
But Venezuela is neither a manufacturer nor the main trafficker of fentanyl, which mostly enters the United States via Mexico.
Cocaine is smuggled through Venezuela according to the former DOJ official, Senate Democrats and other counternarcotics experts interviewed by USA TODAY.
The suspected smugglers “might be aggressive, they might be committing crimes like transporting cocaine, but none of that meets traditional definitions for an attack or an invasion” that justifies using lethal force, said Lisa Gilbert, co-chair of the Not Above the Law coalition of more than 150 legal and national security experts who say they’re committed to protecting U.S. democracy and the rule of law.
“And because the administration has really defended the legal rationale, certainly the legal debate is going to intensify as Trump moves forward” with military actions in and around Venezuela added Gilbert, who is also co-president of the government accountability nonprofit Public Citizen.
What do the White House, Justice Department and Pentagon say?
The White House, Justice Department and Pentagon did not respond to USA TODAY requests for comment. Spokespersons for the three have been vague in their public comments on what laws the administration is using to justify the attacks – and possible further military action against Venezuela.
In a Nov. 12 statement to The Washington Post, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said “current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law,” with all actions in “complete compliance with the law of armed conflict.”
The Justice Department told Reuters “the strikes were consistent with the laws of armed conflict, and as such are lawful orders.”
Trump himself has frequently alleged that Maduro is behind the smuggling as the alleged head of a drug trafficking organization of military officials known as Cartel de los Soles as part of his rationale for ordering the strikes. He has also blamed the Tren de Aragua criminal organization in Venezuela.
In February, the Trump administration blacklisted Tren de Aragua, Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel and other drug gangs as “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” organizations. In August, administration officials said that designation allowed them to use the military to go after Latin American drug gangs – and that they had directed the Pentagon to prepare options.
“We have to start treating them as armed terrorist organizations, not simply drug dealing organizations,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Aug. 8.
The Trump administration went even further on Nov. 24, designating a Venezuelan criminal organization known as Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization. That gives the U.S. expanded use of so-called “War on Terrorism” statutes passed into law after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the traffickers, allowing it to seize U.S. bank accounts related to the organization, to sanction American citizens providing material support and to authorize the federal government to “take measures to prevent members of these groups from entering the United States.”
But those statutes don’t specifically allow the killing of suspected terrorists, especially people believed to be drug traffickers, critics say.
In March, Trump invoked the rarely used Alien Enemies Act to justify deporting alleged Tren de Aragua members.
“This is a time of war, because Biden allowed millions of people, many of them criminals, many of them at the highest level, they emptied jails out,” Trump said. “That’s an invasion. They invaded our country.”
Legal questions – and concerns – remain
Critics also question whether the Trump administration is invoking another powerful post-9/11 counterterrorism tool known as an Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, to justify the drug boat attacks.
The AUMF was established to allow the Department of Defense to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists, but with one key provision – it requires prior authorization by Congress, Democratic lawmakers say.
Sen. Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, was one of many Senate Democrats who took to the Senate floor Nov. 6 seeking to stop the boat attacks and further military action without congressional approval.
The suspected drug smugglers “are criminals, not ideological combatants waging war against the United States,” Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said. “If the White House truly believed that these are terrorist organizations and the Defense Secretary truly thinks Tren de Aragua compares to al-Qaida, the administration should come to Congress and request a AUMF. The fact that they haven’t is revealing.”
Reed characterized it as a bipartisan issue, saying he and Republican Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi have sent multiple requests to Hegseth “to submit the basic information Congress is legally entitled to: execute orders, legal justifications, and intelligence underpinning individual strikes.”
Reed said the Pentagon has taken more than two months to provide only some of the requested information, and has refused to answer “simple questions regarding the very limited information that has been provided to date.”
Republicans in the Senate have supported Trump, blocking along party lines a Democrat-initiated measure Oct. 8 that would bar the administration from using military force against boats in the Caribbean Sea without authorization from Congress.
“This is an attack on the United States by people who have been designated as terrorists,” said Senator James Risch, R-Idaho, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “The president not only has the right, he has the duty to do something about this.”
After Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky began going public with his concerns that the attacks amounted to illegal “extrajudicial killings,” Trump said his administration would be willing to brief lawmakers on the strikes.
But on Oct. 23, Trump said he saw no reason to seek congressional authorization for them.
Instead of asking for a “declaration of war” from Congress, Trump said, “I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. … “They’re going to be, like, dead.”
And, Trump added, “The land is going to be next.”