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venezuela
Another 'Extrajudicial Execution' as US Bombs Second Alleged Venezuelan Drug Boat
"There is no legal justification for this military strike," said one Amnesty International campaigner. "The US must be held accountable."
Sep 15, 2025
President Donald Trump said Monday that the US carried out a fresh strike on what he said was a boat used by Venezuelan drug gangs, killing three people in what one human rights campaigner called another "extrajudicial execution."
"This morning, on my Orders, US Military Forces conducted a SECOND Kinetic Strike against positively identified, extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels and narcoterrorists in the [US Southern Command] area of responsibility," Trump said on his Truth Social network. "The Strike occurred while these confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela were in International Waters transporting illegal narcotics (A DEADLY WEAPON POISONING AMERICANS!) headed to the US."
"These extremely violent drug trafficking cartels POSE A THREAT to US National Security, Foreign Policy, and vital US Interests," the Republican president continued. "The Strike resulted in three male terrorists killed in action. No US Forces were harmed in this Strike."
"BE WARNED—IF YOU ARE TRANSPORTING DRUGS THAT CAN KILL AMERICANS, WE ARE HUNTING YOU!" Trump added. "The illicit activities by these cartels have wrought DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCES ON AMERICAN COMMUNITIES FOR DECADES, killing millions of American Citizens. NO LONGER. Thank you for your attention to this matter!!!"
US President Trump just announced that a second drug smuggling boat from Venezuela was hit by a US airstrike in the Caribbean, killing 3 people on board the boat.#Venezuela pic.twitter.com/dO34gYr9GZ
— CNW (@ConflictsW) September 15, 2025
Responding to arguments by legal experts and Venezuelan officials that the September 2 strike was illegal, Trump said Sunday that "what's illegal are the drugs that were on the boat... and the fact that 300 million people died last year from drugs."
Only 62 million people died in the entire world of all causes last year, making Trump's claim impossibly false.
Monday's attack followed the September 2 bombing of a vessel allegedly transporting cocaine off the Venezuelan coast, a strike that killed 11 people. Venezuelan officials say none of the 11 men were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, as claimed by Trump.
On his first day back in the White House, Trump signed an executive order designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Last month, the president reportedly signed a secret order directing the Pentagon to use military force to combat drug cartels abroad, sparking fears of renewed US aggression in a region that has endured well over 100 US attacks, invasions, occupations, and other interventions since the issuance of the dubious Monroe Doctrine in 1823.
The Intercept's Nick Turse reported Monday that the Trump administration's recently rebranded Department of War "is thwarting congressional oversight" of the September 2 attack.
“I’m incredibly disturbed by this new reporting that the Trump administration launched multiple strikes on the boat off Venezuela,” Congresswoman Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) said in response to Turse's reporting. “They didn’t even bother to seek congressional authorization, bragged about these killings—and teased more to come.”
Common Dreams reported last week that Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) introduced a war powers resolution seeking to restrain Trump from conducting attacks in the Caribbean.
Also last week, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) led a letter signed by two dozen Democratic colleagues and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) asserting that the Trump administration offered "no legitimate justification" for the first boat strike.
It's not just congressional Democrats who have decried Trump's September 2 attack. Last week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said that "the recent drone attack on a small speedboat over 2,000 miles from our shore without identification of the occupants or the content of the boat is in no way part of a declared war, and defies our longstanding Coast Guard rules of engagement."
“What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial," Paul later added.
Paul also mirrored Democratic lawmakers' questioning of Trump's narrative that the boat bombed on September 2 was heading to the United States.
Echoing congressional critics, Daphne Eviatar, director of Amnesty International's Security With Human Rights program, said of Monday's attack, "Today, President Trump claimed his administration carried out another lethal strike against a boat in the Caribbean."
"This is an extrajudicial execution, which is murder," Eviatar added. "There is no legal justification for this military strike. The US must be held accountable."
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Eleven Dead on the High Seas. Trump Is Testing the Waters For Illegal Military Rule in America
The recent massacre in the Caribbean was a step toward making America a police state under President-for-Life Trump.
Sep 15, 2025
Why is Donald Trump committing murder on the high seas?
Last week President Trump bragged that “On my Orders,” the Navy destroyed a speedboat with eleven people aboard, claiming that those slain were “Tren de Aragua Narco terrorists . . . transporting illegal narcotics, heading for the United States.”
The legal procedure for dealing with drug traffickers on the high seas is actually for the Navy or Coast Guard to stop and board the suspect vessel, confirm it is carrying illegal drugs, then arrest and prosecute those on board.
Instead, Trump treated what should have been an (alleged) criminal law enforcement matter as open warfare and, without any need, killed everyone aboard. Why? Because Trump wants the lethal use of military firepower on supposed foreign “bad guys” to serve as a model for militarizing American cities – in the name of stopping an imaginary crime wave.
One week after the Caribbean Sea attack, Trump and the Defense Department have yet to provide evidence the vessel was carrying drugs to America. But even if had been, summarily killing eleven civilians is still murder.
Killing eleven people in Venezuela was Donald Trump’s out-of-town tryout. Trump’s militarization of our cities, if not resisted, could lead to the termination of free elections in America.
Calling a criminal gang a “foreign terrorist organization” does not make it legal to slay alleged gang members without a trial – particularly when the gang has not been linked to acts of political terrorism, as confirmed by the fact that the Justice Department’s two indictments of gang members include no charges of terrorism.
Still less does tagging them “Narco terrorists” mean that the United States is in “armed conflict” with a gang, to which the laws of war might apply. Gangs aren’t enemy nations and they’re not fighting for a political ideology – they’re in it for the money. Suppressing them isn’t warfare. The Navy was not engaged in a naval battle with a speedboat.
A former State Department attorney specializing in counterterrorism, Brian Finucane, put it succinctly. “Outside of armed conflict, we have a word for the premeditated killing of people. That word is murder.”
Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, confirmed the point. “Using lethal force in this way, outside of any recognizable armed conflict and without due process, is an extrajudicial execution, not an act of war.” Myriad legal experts confirm that obvious conclusion.
But Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to justify the slayings by asserting “interdiction doesn't work.” “What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them.”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth echoed the sentiment. “Anyone trafficking in those waters who we know is a deadly terrorist will face the same fate.”
But if our military is allowed to blow up people on unproven assertions of drug dealing, the same logic would justify the military engaging in summary executions of those they deem “bad guys” in the United States itself. Which is perhaps the point.
Drug trafficking is not a capital offense in the United States. The alleged crimes would not warrant execution even if Trump’s targets were found to be cartel drug smugglers..
In reality, there is little reason to credit Trump’s claims about who the people on board were and what they were doing.
- The U.S. Department of Justice brought two indictments against the Tren de Aragua gang this year, in April and August. Neither indictment alleges the gang brings drugs from Venezuela to the United States.
- The indictments actually suggest more disturbing possibilities: that most of those Trump ordered killed were victims of sex trafficking. The April indictment charged Tren de Aragua with “forcing young women trafficked from Venezuela into commercial sex work.”
- A former senior federal law enforcement official suggested that the vessel was on a human smuggling run, carrying refugees seeking to flee Venezuela.
Nonetheless, Trump prefers the drug smuggling story because it is part of his strategy to conflate immigration, crime and gangs to justify sending troops into American cities.
Trump’s claim that undocumented immigrants have brought rampant crime to America is false. Few of those Trump is deporting have committed a serious crime, and immigrants as a group are actually less likely to commit crimes than native born Americans. But Trump has repeated his phony charge hundreds of times, and it has had an impact.
Drug-running gangs enjoy little sympathy, and Trump expects few people to worry about whether the eleven individuals he ordered killed were drug traffickers or actually the gang’s victims. But if he gets away with having the Navy blow them up, he hopes Americans will come to see troops on our streets as acceptable, even desirable, since they are (purportedly) fighting the same drug dealing villains.
Trump himself drew the direct connection between his war powers as commander in chief and his claim that military force is the solution to crime in the U.S. when he recently threatened, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
He will not immediately order unrestrained violence against alleged criminals (or opponents) as freely as he did in the Caribbean Sea off Venezuela. But he has begun the process of legitimizing law-free military “law enforcement,” first abroad and eventually in America.
Where will it end?
Trump has declared emergency after emergency, many of them focusing on his deportation agenda, and all of them stretching – and breaching – the lawful limits of presidential power. Trump has correctly concluded that if he is to swiftly deport millions of immigrants without considering their possible right to be here, his targets must be deprived of the due process of law which our Constitution guarantees to everyone in America.
But eliminating due process rights does not enjoy broad popular support, and Trump’s deportation efforts have repeatedly been stymied by the courts. Enter the concocted “Narco terrorist” boat incident. In Trump’s narrative – never mind truth or evidence – the U.S. Navy eliminates “bad guys” on the high seas without bothersome legal process.
It’s political theater. But not just theater.
The legal theories are those Trump’s Justice Department has asserted with little success in federal court: First, that Trump is entitled to use the military for “law enforcement” because we are being “invaded.” Second, that alleged gang members can be summarily deported and imprisoned (and now killed) because we are “at war” with cartels. Trump may not be able to persuade the courts that these outlandish legal theories are correct, but he can act on them with impunity in the waters off Venezuela, by ordering the Navy to dole out death.
Trump’s ultimate end is plain enough: unlimited power.
Donald Trump was the only president in the life of the Republic to refuse to surrender office after losing an election. Donald Trump was the only president to unleash an insurrection to try to hold onto office. And now, having lawfully returned to power, he has not concealed his desire to remain after his current term ends.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised his followers that if he was elected, things would be “fixed so good” that “in four years, you don't have to vote again.” And, after predicting his election to a second four-year term, Trump told another audience “we’re probably entitled to another four after that.”
Trump has said he is “not joking.” “A lot of people want me to do it,” he told NBC News this Spring. “There are methods which you could do it.”
What method does Trump have in mind? Here are some ways Trump could use the military to unconstitutionally retain power:
Arrest or detain voters. Recall Trump’s baseless assertion that undocumented immigrants are voting en masse in American elections. With the military placed in key cities as a “crime fighting” force, Trump could use the soldiers and his masked ICE agents to remove Hispanics and other “suspect” voters from polling places, on the claim the soldiers are “ensuring election integrity.” Troops at polling places arresting people would certainly also frighten others away from the polls.
Seize voting machines. In 2020 Trump explored having Homeland Security or the Defense Department take control of voting machines in swing states. Attorney General Robert Barr reportedly shot down the suggestion.
But loyal sycophants Attorney General Pam Bondi or “War” Department Secretary Hegseth might well direct their departments to obey Trump’s orders to confiscate voting machines – and later report Trump’s amazing, landslide electoral victory.
Cancel elections because of an “emergency.” Donald Trump is the master of emergencies. He might manufacture one to justify suspending elections.
Trump claimed a handful of disruptive protests against ICE raids in Los Angeles constituted a “rebellion,” requiring a military response. And he falsely asserted crime was “totally out of control in the District of Columbia” to rationalize the troop takeover of the nation’s capital. Now he threatens to send troops into Chicago, Baltimore and other cities that tend to vote Democratic.
As Trump prepares to rig the 2028 election as best he can, millions of Americans will take to the streets against his illegal candidacy. Trump has little tolerance for the constitutional right to assemble and protest. In June 2025 he warned: “For those people who want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force.” During the widespread peaceful demonstrations over the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Trump asked his Defense Secretary about protestors near the White House. “Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”
The Defense Secretary at the time did not grant Trump’s wish. But loyalist Hegseth is not likely to oppose any Trump suggestion.
A president who whipped up a mob to seize the Capitol in January 2021 could mobilize right-wing militias and MAGA forces for political violence before an election, and Trump might assert that elections had to be suspended until “order” was (someday) restored. Troops would enforce “calm” as the election was dismantled.
These scenarios only seem far-fetched because we still find it difficult to contemplate an American president engaging in naked, lethal dictatorial action.
Killing eleven people in Venezuela was Donald Trump’s out-of-town tryout. Trump’s militarization of our cities, if not resisted, could lead to the termination of free elections in America.
Mobilizing for the next election is not enough. The danger is now and we must resist now. We must withhold our cooperation from Trump’s authoritarian moves, refuse to obey in advance, pressure the institutions we are associated with to stand up for our constitutional democracy, and peacefully take to the streets to demonstrate the scope of the resistance. It is not too late. But if democracy is to be rescued, we must be the rescuers ourselves.
Don’t just blow your horn. Get out of the car and join the protest.
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Omar Brings War Powers Resolution After Trump Bombed Boat in Caribbean With 'No Legal Justification'
"It was not self-defense or authorized by Congress," the Minnesota congresswoman said of Trump's strike on a boat bound from Venezuela, which killed 11 people last week.
Sep 12, 2025
US Rep. Ilhan Omar introduced a war powers resolution in the US House of Representatives on Thursday, seeking to restrain President Donald Trump from conducting attacks in the Caribbean after he ordered a drone strike on a ship from Venezuela last week, killing 11 people.
The Trump administration has claimed, with little evidence, that the boat was a drug trafficking vessel that posed an imminent threat to the United States. But that narrative has come increasingly into doubt in recent days.
In a statement on the resolution provided to The Intercept, Omar (D-Minn.) said:
There was no legal justification for the Trump administration’s military escalation in the Caribbean... It was not self-defense or authorized by Congress. That is why I am introducing a resolution to terminate hostilities against Venezuela, and against the transnational criminal organizations that the administration has designated as terrorists this year. All of us should agree that the separation of powers is crucial to our democracy, and that only Congress has the power to declare war.
Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution gives Congress the "sole authority to declare war," but presidents have often carried out military actions without congressional approval, citing their role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, particularly since the passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force in 2001.
The War Powers Act of 1973 allows Congress to check the president's war-making authority, requiring the president to report military actions to Congress within 48 hours and requiring Congress to authorize the deployment of troops after 60 days.
Omar unveiled the resolution alongside several of her fellow members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, including Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) and caucus whip Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.).
"Donald Trump cannot be allowed to drag the United States into another endless war with his reckless actions," Casar said. "It is illegal for the president to take the country to war without consulting the people's representatives, and Congress must vote now to stop Trump from putting us at further risk."
In the days following Trump's strike on the ship, the administration's narrative that it contained members of Venezuela's Tren de Aragua gang bound for the United States has been called into question by news reports and by those briefed by the Department of Defense, which the Trump administration recently rebranded as the "Department of War."
After his staff was briefed on Tuesday, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CNN that the Pentagon has "offered no positive identification that the boat was Venezuelan, nor that its crew were members of Tren de Aragua or any other cartel."
While Trump has stated that the boat was en route to the US, the briefers themselves acknowledged that they could not determine its destination. Secretary of State Marco Rubio contradicted the president, saying "these particular drugs were probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean, at which point they just contribute to the instability these countries are facing."
The New York Times, meanwhile, reported Wednesday that the boat "had altered its course and appeared to have turned around before the attack started," which further contradicts the claim of imminent harm to the US.
“There is no evidence—none—that this strike was conducted in self-defense," Reed said. "That matters, because under both domestic and international law, the US military simply does not have the authority to use lethal force against a civilian vessel unless acting in self-defense.”
Even if the people aboard the boat were carrying drugs, as the administration claims, there is no legal precedent for the crime of drug trafficking justifying such an extraordinary use of military retaliation.
The White House has attempted to argue that the president has the legal authority to summarily kill suspected drug smugglers using an unprecedented legal rationale, which labels cartel members as tantamount to enemy combatants, who are allowed to be killed in war, because the product they carry causes thousands of deaths per year in the US. Legal analysts have described this as a flimsy pretext for extrajudicial murder.
Scott R. Anderson, a senior fellow in the National Security Law Program at Columbia Law School and a former legal adviser at the US State Department, wrote for the Lawfare blog:
There is no colorable statutory authority for military action against Tren de Aragua and other similarly situated groups. Occasional suggestions in the press that the Trump administration’s description of Tren de Aragua as a terrorist organization is meant to invoke the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) are almost certainly mistaken: That authorization extends only to the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and select associates, and no one—not even in the Trump administration—has accused Tren de Aragua of being that.
Marty Lederman, who served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel from 2009 to 2010, wrote for Just Security:
Regardless of which laws might have been broken, what’s more alarming, and of greater long-term concern, is that U.S. military personnel crossed a fundamental line the Department of Defense has been resolutely committed to upholding for many decades—namely, that (except in rare and extreme circumstances not present here) the military must not use lethal force against civilians, even if they are alleged, or even known, to be violating the law."
The resolution introduced by Omar is the first seeking to restrain Trump's ability to launch military strikes against Venezuela. But it's not the first seeking to rein in his wide-ranging use of unilateral warmaking authority.
In June, following his launch of airstrikes against Iran, war powers resolutions introduced in the House and Senate to limit Trump's actions in the Middle East narrowly failed despite receiving some Republican support.
Though specific attempts to rein in Trump's power have failed, the House did pass a bipartisan resolution earlier this week to repeal the AUMFs issued by Congress in the lead-up to the Iraq War, and which presidents have used for over two decades to justify a wide range of military actions across the Middle East without congressional oversight.
If passed, Omar's measure would require Trump to obtain congressional approval before using military force against Venezuela or launching more strikes on transnational criminal organizations that he has designated as terrorist groups since February, including Tren de Aragua.
García, the Progressive Caucus whip, said the resolution was an effort to begin restoring Congress' authority to check a president operating with impunity.
"The extrajudicial strike against a vessel in the Caribbean Sea is only the most recent of Trump’s reckless, deadly, and illegal military actions. Now, he’s lawlessly threatening a region already profoundly impacted by the destabilization of U.S. actions,” said García. "With this War Powers Resolution, we emphasize the total illegality of his action, and— consistent with overwhelming public opposition to forever war—reclaim Congress' sole power to authorize military action.”
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