The Trump administration has escalated a military campaign in the Caribbean against alleged drug traffickers and could soon target Venezuelan military facilities in the counternarcotics attacks.
The first strike took out 11 alleged drug traffickers reportedly bound for the United States, setting off an escalation of aggressive military hits on drug boats in the Caribbean. Since then, more than a dozen such strikes have taken place.
Trump administration officials have defended the strikes, saying the drug traffickers are “operating under the control” of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro.
Some legal experts, however, have questioned Trump’s authority to carry out strikes without congressional approval. Trump has also faced questions from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, leading him to authorize new briefings for Congress, Axios recently reported.
Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal adviser, told The Daily Wire that “the strikes are not legal” and lack justification.
“The precedent that this administration seems to be invoking are strikes the U.S. has taken over the course of the last 20-plus years in the context of the U.S. war on terror against groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS,” he said. “But those precedents are really irrelevant and a red herring with respect to the strikes we’re seeing in the Caribbean and now the Pacific.”
“For the first time, the U.S. government designated criminal entities, drug trafficking organizations as foreign terrorist organizations,” he explained. “But those assertions seem to be undermined by the U.S. Intelligence community.”
The situation reached a boiling point earlier this month, with reports that the Trump administration could soon target Venezuelan military facilities believed to have a role in the drug trade. The White House and Trump, however, pushed back on claims of an imminent attack.
The Treasury Department sanctioned Maduro in July, accusing him of leading Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles and supporting the Tren de Aragua prison gang and Sinaloa cartel.
Trump designated Cartel de los Soles and Tren de Aragua as terrorist organizations after they “conducted kidnappings, extorted businesses, bribed public officials, authorized its members to attack and kill U.S. law enforcement, and assassinated a Venezuelan opposition figure.” In August, Trump doubled the bounty for Maduro’s capture to $50 million — the largest such reward in U.S. history — and offered $25 million apiece for his cartel lieutenants, including Diosdado Cabello and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López.
But the designation doesn’t afford Trump the authority to hit the alleged drug runners, Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, told The Daily Wire.
“So the distinction between war and crime is what I think is at the heart of this,” Shapiro said. “Twenty-five years ago, for the first time, the president invoked the war powers against Al Qaeda, which is a non-state actor and here we also have apparently a non-state actor drug cartels. And so the issue isn’t the harm caused by the drug cartels … there’s a talking point that drug overdose deaths in a single year surpass totaled American deaths in most major wars. But that doesn’t change crime into war.”
“Armed force, I think, is justified when enemy attack political reasons, whether it’s Al Qaeda or Hamas or someone else like that, but usually the military isn’t appropriate against criminals, and criminal gangs could be treated as military targets, if and when they act as arms of a hostile war government,” he said.
Shapiro recognized that military force could be “appropriate” if there were evidence proving that the drug trafficking in the Caribbean “is the Venezuelan government’s attempt to destabilize or otherwise attack the United States.”
“But if they’re just criminal gangs, looking to make a profit, then I don’t think it’s appropriate to use military force,” he added.
Recognizing he holds a “minority” opinion on the issue for believing that Trump has the authority to act alone, Dr. Nicholas Creel, law professor at Georgia College and State University, told The Daily Wire that the president has the authority to act alone when “emergencies” occur.
“I think it’s pretty clear that he does have the authority to do this,” said Creel.
While Congress has the authority to declare war, the president has the power to respond to attacks without awaiting a vote or any possible delay. He said there’s roughly five out of 30 examples of “instances where we moved first and somebody died” where the president actually received congressional approval.
“What a lot of people lose in this is if we do agree that the president has the authority to respond to attacks, who is it that gets to define an attack is? It has to be the president,” Creel said. “It necessarily cannot be Congress.”
“That’s why we chose this word to give the president the authority to respond to these attacks so it has to be that decides what this attack is. And if you or I think this is not an attack, fine, but we’re not the president.”
He continued: “Pretty much every president since FDR would have to have been said to have acted unconstitutionally in terms of the war powers, which seems a bit odd. If it’s that common a practice, is it really, I mean, just because people are doing it doesn’t mean it’s legal, but at the same time, if everybody is basically doing it? Is it really illegal?”
Trump sent the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, along with her full strike group, to the region this week, marking the largest concentration of naval assets in the region in decades.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth also deployed F-35B fighters and MQ-9 Reapers to Puerto Rico, which are capable of destroying clandestine drug labs and airstrips in Venezuelan territory.
Trump recently confirmed that he authorized the CIA to conduct covert actions inside Venezuela. United States military aircraft have also recently buzzed the Venezuelan coast in recent weeks.
