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Trump Admin Considering a Strike on Venezuela, Military Sources Say
The US is considering "shooting down Venezuelan military aircraft" or "bombing Venezuelan military airfield," according to a report from independent journalist Ken Klippenstein.
Sep 10, 2025
US President Donald Trump's administration is considering launching military strikes on Venezuela, according to new reporting from independent journalist Ken Klippenstein.
Military sources on Tuesday told Klippenstein that the Trump administration is mulling an attack against Venezuela unless it cracks down on drug cartels that it claims are shipping fentanyl into the United States.
Contrary to the administration's claims, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies, Venezuela plays virtually no role in fentanyl manufacturing and trafficking.
Klippenstein's sources said the attack was likely to involve "shooting down Venezuelan military aircraft or by bombing Venezuelan military airfield," and that the US Air Force has been rehearsing for such a mission in recent weeks.
Such an attack would mark a dramatic escalation in the Trump administration's hostilities toward Venezuela, which escalated last week when the administration bombed a boat off the Venezuelan coast that it alleged was carrying drug traffickers.
Many legal experts were quick to condemn the strike as a violation of maritime law. Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was among those who condemned the military attack on suspected drug smugglers without due process.
A leaked Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by Klippenstein gives clues as to why the administration is taking an aggressive military posture toward Venezuela.
Specifically, writes Klippenstein, the memo gives insight into the administration's view that Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro is actually in charge of the Tren de Aragua cartel and is giving it orders to poison American citizens by getting them addicted to drugs.
However, Klippenstein cautions that this view of Maduro as the commander of an international drug cartel is not backed up by US intelligence agencies.
"A declassified assessment prepared by the National Intelligence Council concluded in April that the Maduro regime 'probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TdA and is not directing TdA operations in the United States,'" he noted.
Klippenstein closed his report by likening the situation to the buildup to the 2003 Iraq War, but with fentanyl taking the place of "weapons of mass destruction" as the purported casus belli.
"Similar to the 'debate' about Saddam's WMD, Democrats in Congress are busy discussing whether the strike on a small drug boat was legal and complaining that they weren't briefed on the operation," he wrote. "The fundamental question—is there any evidence that the Venezuela government is directing fentanyl into the U.S.?—is hardly ever asked. And most importantly, would bombing Venezuela do anything to reduce the flow of drugs into the U.S.?"
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'Cruel': Trump Moves to End TPS for Quarter of a Million Venezuelans
"For the last four years, they've been working legally and paying taxes like everyone else," said one advocate. "Now Trump's going to kick them all out."
Sep 04, 2025
As tensions between the US and Venezuela were inflamed Wednesday by the Trump administration's deadly attack on a boat off the coast of the South American country, the Department of Homeland Security announced it was ending legal protections for more than a quarter of a million Venezuelans who President Donald Trump had previously shielded from deportation.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) declared that allowing Venezuelan nationals to remain in the US with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was "not in America's best interests," but the move was swiftly denounced as both cruel and misguided by critics.
The administration had weighed "public safety, national security, migration factors, immigration policy, economic considerations, and foreign policy," spokesperson Matthew Tragesser said, and urged Venezuelan migrants to "self-deport." USCIS also said that "conditions in Venezuela no longer meet the TPS statutory requirements."
More than 250,000 Venezuelans who were granted TPS in 2021 have faced a September 10 expiration date on their status, but the Trump administration had the option to renew their status.
The migrants are not part of a separate group of 350,000 Venezuelans whose TPS status the Supreme Court allowed President Donald Trump to revoke in May; those migrants were granted the protections by the Biden administration in 2023.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro declared an "economic emergency" in April, attributing the country's financial struggles to Trump's tariffs. The country has also faced years of economic mismanagement and US sanctions, exacerbating the crisis, and Maduro's government has repressed protests against his controversial reelection in 2024. The UN special rapporteur on the right to food said after a visit to the country earlier this year that nearly 82% of people in Venezuela were living in poverty and more than half had insufficient income to purchase a basic food basket.
Critics on Wednesday noted that the US State Department continues to advise Americans not to travel to Venezuela, saying there is a "high risk of wrongful detention, torture in detention, terrorism, kidnapping, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, and poor health infrastructure."
While Venezuelans "are going hungry and without food and medicine," said US Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.), "the Trump Admin. is stripping TPS for Venezuelans in the US and is claiming that conditions in Venezuela are not that bad."
Andrea Flores, vice president of immigration policy and campaigns at FWD.us, said USCIS did not make clear "how ending TPS for Venezuelans is in the best interest of the United States."
"Not only is this a mass de-legalization effort, it pushes hundreds of thousands of people out of the workforce," said Flores. "The economic consequences of the shrinking workforce impacts all of us."
Since taking office, Trump has designated the Venezuelan street gang Tren de Aragua a terrorist organization and has claimed it coordinates with the Maduro government—an assessment rejected by US intelligence agencies. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested about 8,000 Venezuelans in the first half of 2025, and the administration has used the Alien Enemies Act—previously only used in wartime—to expel hundreds of Venezuelans from the US. On Wednesday, a federal court ruled that Trump had illegally invoked the law.
The administration has claimed it is rounding up criminals, but an analysis in June by the libertarian Cato Institute found that 65% of people arrested by ICE had no criminal conviction, and 93% were not convicted for violent crimes.
The administration has also deployed several warships off the coast of Venezuela as he's threatened military force against drug cartels in the country, despite the lack of evidence that cartel activity takes place there. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, just 2% of all cocaine seized by the agency is in Venezuela.
On Wednesday, the administration drew outrage from human rights advocates as it announced it had attacked a boat that it claimed was transporting cocaine and linked to Tren de Aragua, killing 11 people.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, emphasized that the TPS beneficiaries who are now being ordered to "self-deport" or face expulsion "were previously granted deportation protections by Trump himself."
"Every person under this protection has been vetted at least twice," he said. "Anyone with any serious offense on their record is ineligible for protections. For the last four years, they've been working legally and paying taxes like everyone else. Now Trump's going to kick them all out."
"This is a quarter million people whose lives are about to be completely upended," he added, "for nothing but politics."
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Experts Decry US 'Summary Execution' of Alleged Drug Runners Off Venezuelan Coast
"Drug trafficking is a crime, not an act of war," noted one critic. "Traffickers must be arrested, not summarily executed."
Sep 03, 2025
Legal and human rights experts said that Tuesday's deadly US attack on a boat the Trump administration claimed was transporting cocaine off the coast of Venezuela violated international law.
"Drug trafficking is a crime, not an act of war," former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth said on social media following the strike, which US President Donald Trump said killed 11 people. "Traffickers must be arrested, not summarily executed, which US forces just illegally did."
"Trump admits he ordered a summary execution—the crime of murder," Roth added. "Drug traffickers are not combatants who can be shot on sight. They are criminal suspects who must be arrested and prosecuted."
Declassified video showing the U.S. committing a war crime when it fired on a civilian vessel near Venezuela.Being suspected of carrying drugs does not carry a death sentence and certainly not without due process.
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— Arturo Dominguez 🇨🇺🇺🇸 (@extremearturo.bsky.social) September 2, 2025 at 4:02 PM
Michael Becker, an associate professor of international law at Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland, told the BBC Wednesday that the Trump administration's designation of the Venezuela-based Tren de Aragua and other drug trafficking groups as terrorist organizations "stretches the meaning of the term beyond its breaking point."
"The fact that US officials describe the individuals killed by the US strike as narcoterrorists does not transform them into lawful military targets," Becker said. "The US is not engaged in an armed conflict with Venezuela or the Tren de Aragua criminal organization."
"Not only does the strike appear to have violated the prohibition on the use of force, it also runs afoul of the right to life under international human rights law," Becker added.
Although the United States is not a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, US military legal advisers have asserted that the country should "act in a manner consistent with its provisions."
Luke Moffett, a professor of international law at Queens University Belfast in Northern Ireland, told the BBC that while "force can be used to stop a boat," this should generally be accomplished using "nonlethal measures."
Such action, said Moffett, must be "reasonable and necessary in self-defense where there is immediate threat of serious injury or loss of life to enforcement officials," and the US attack was likely "unlawful under the law of the sea."
"It reflects the worst of US militarism—secretive, unilateral, and contemptuous of due process, human rights, and the rule of law."
The peace group CodePink said Wednesday that "even if Washington's claims are accurate, drug trafficking does not justify a death sentence delivered by missile."
"International law is clear: The use of force is only lawful in self-defense or with explicit UN Security Council authorization," the group continued. "This strike had neither. It reflects the worst of US militarism—secretive, unilateral, and contemptuous of due process, human rights, and the rule of law."
"Under US law, it's equally indefensible," CodePink argued. "The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to authorize war. Unilateral action may only be used in emergencies or self-defense, and this strike meets neither."
CodePink continued:
With the US Southern Command assets already deployed in the region, why blow up a vessel instead of capturing and interrogating the crew? If the goal were really to uncover evidence of [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro's alleged involvement, this reckless approach raises only two possibilities: Either the narrative is fabricated and Washington used it as a pretext for a deadly show of force or it's real, and the US chose extrajudicial killing over law, evidence, and humanity.
CodePink called on Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) "to lead the fight in Congress to stop this escalation," urging him to "introduce legislation to block unauthorized military force, hold hearings to expose the dangers of border militarization, insist on transparency of all relevant directives, and rally Congress to cut off funding for these reckless operations."
Tuesday's attack came amid Trump's deployment of an armada of naval warships off the coast of Venezuela, whose socialist government has long endured US threats of regime change—and sometimes more.
Infused with the notion that it has the right to meddle anywhere in the hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine, the US has attacked, invaded, occupied, and otherwise intervened in Latin American and Caribbean nations well over 100 times since the dubious declaration was issued by President James Monroe in 1823.
Since the late 19th century, oil-rich Venezuela has seen US interventions including involvement in border disputes, help with military coups, support for dictators, and attempts to subvert the Bolivarian Revolution—including by officially recognizing opposition figures claiming to be the legitimate presidents of the country.
Critics of US imperialism highlighted Washington's hypocritical policies and practices toward Venezuela.
"Venezuela produces no cocaine, but US warships patrol its coastline under the banner of a 'drug war,'" New Hampshire Peace Action organizing director Michael "Lefty" Morrill wrote Wednesday.
Meanwhile, neighboring Colombia and nearby Peru—the world's two leading cocaine producers—get no such treatment. Nor does Ecuador, which has emerged as one of the world's leading trafficking hubs.
Morrill also briefly explored bits of the long US history of supporting narcotraffickers when strategically expedient, noting that former Panamanian President Manuel Noriega "was first a CIA asset, then branded a narco-dictator and dragged to a US prison."
"The Taliban was once a strategic partner in Afghanistan's opium trade, before being cast as the world's largest trafficker," he added. "'Drugs' are not simply powders; they are pretexts, shaped to fit the contours of empire."
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