Drug Enforcement Administration officials advocated for a series of military strikes in Mexico earlier this year, alarming some in the White House and Pentagon and presaging the fraught debate underway in Washington over the legality of this month’s deadly attacks on alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea, people familiar with the matter said.
DEA faced pushback at White House, Pentagon after urging Mexico strikes
The suggestion, though not acted upon, was met with alarm from officials who warned that Congress has not authorized such action.
September 19, 2025 The Washington Post
The discussion began in the opening weeks of President Donald Trump’s return to office, after he designated numerous Latin American cartels and criminal gangs as foreign terrorist organizations. DEA officials suggested both targeted killings of cartel leadership in Mexico and attacks on infrastructure there, these people said. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of highly sensitive and private internal deliberations.
The pushback on DEA’s advocacy, which has not been reported previously, illustrates the divisions that have arisen as the Trump administration has taken an aggressive posture toward combating what it says is a major adversary poisoning American citizens. And though DEA’s proposals for Mexico have not been acted upon, this month’s strikes on alleged drug boats from Venezuela show the administration’s determination to unleash deadly force despite internal legal concerns.
DEA’s acting administrator at the time of these early conversations, Derek S. Maltz, told The Washington Post that he is “totally in favor” — and has been since Trump’s first term as president — “of hitting the production labs and command control leaders in Mexico.” A career DEA agent before retiring a decade ago, Maltz was appointed by Trump in January and led the agency until May. Its permanent administrator, Terrance C. Cole, took over in late July.
“The cartels have killed more Americans than any terrorist organization in the history of America, so they need to be held accountable,” Maltz said. He credited the Mexican government under President Claudia Sheinbaum with “making substantial arrests and seizures and disrupting the cartels” but said “there must be way more done to stop them.”
“My position was always to do it collaboratively and cooperatively with Mexico,” Maltz said, “but at the end of the day America has to stand up for Americans first.” He added that he supported carrying out drone strikes on drug labs and had the sense there was “some serious discussion over the authorities and options” needed to do so. Such efforts, he said, were not DEA’s area of expertise and required collaboration with the Pentagon.
In a statement, DEA officials said the agency would not comment on “alleged conversations or internal deliberations” occurring before Cole’s tenure began.
“What we can say is that under Administrator Cole, DEA remains committed to supporting the President of the United States and ensuring our mission is carried out within the framework of the law and in close coordination with our interagency partners.”
A spokesperson for Sheinbaum referred questions about the deliberations to her previous public comments on the issue. The Mexican president has repeatedly called for the United States to collaborate with her government and respect its sovereignty, proposed a constitutional amendment to make it clear that no outside interference is allowed, and deployed 10,000 Mexican soldiers near its border with the United States to bolster security.
NBC News reported in April that drone strikes and other military action were under consideration.
Though Trump has repeatedly signaled a desire and willingness to attack Mexican cartels on their turf, he has refrained from doing so thus far. Earlier this month, his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, declared the United States would not need to use lethal force in “cooperative” countries that proactively advance the administration’s counternarcotics objectives.
DEA’s suggestion appeared intended to ensure the agency had a seat at the table as the White House moved quickly to refashion U.S. foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere, people familiar with the matter said. The conversations were fairly conceptual and lacked a robust legal framework, several people said. They just wanted the military to “go get them’’ — meaning the cartels — “because now we have the [foreign terrorist] designation,” said one person. “They were drawing analogies to terror strikes, and that’s not the way it works.”
In particular, said a second person, “it was not an authorization for the use of military force. Just because something is labeled a terrorist organization does not give you the authority to fire anything at them.”
Some officials at the Pentagon and the White House spent time with DEA officials explaining the authority conferred by the designation. DEA officials seemed receptive, several people said.
People familiar with the matter said that interagency discussions about cartels have been coordinated by the White House, including in meetings overseen by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
The DEA proposal prompted some officials at the Pentagon and other agencies to note there was no applicable congressional authorization on the books to use military force against drug cartels, people familiar with the matter said. Some of them also noted that U.S. citizens might be killed in the process, the people said.
Concerned officials also cited Title 14 of U.S. law, which grants the Coast Guard authority to carry out drug interdiction as a law enforcement mission, including stopping and inspecting vessels, seizing drugs and weapons, and making arrests in international waters when warranted to protect the United States. That mission could be expanded under the law, some of those officials argued, by sending more Coast Guard vessels and Navy warships with Coast Guard members aboard them to the region.
The discussion has taken on a new significance following recent military action in the Caribbean, on Sept. 2 and Sept. 15, against what Trump administration officials have called Venezuelan “narcoterrorists” piloting drug boats. The first operation killed 11 people, and the second one killed three, Trump has said. On Tuesday he disclosed that a third boat also had been targeted, but the Pentagon and White House have declined to offer additional details about any of the incidents.
It is not clear whether the objections raised previously about potential U.S. strikes in Mexico prompted the administration to pursue a different approach or if administration officials are still considering strikes on Mexican cartels.
Trump on Monday suggested his administration was preparing to take military action against cartels that move illicit drugs over land as well. He did not identify specific groups or prospective locations, saying only, “We’re going to be stopping them the same way we stopped the boats.”
It remains unclear, too, what legal basis the administration has used to conduct its military strikes in the Caribbean.
Sean Parnell, a spokesman for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, said in a statement that operations carried out in the Caribbean thus far are “lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in complete compliance with the law of armed conflict.”
“Lawyers up and down the chain of command have been thoroughly involved in reviewing these operations prior to execution, [with] none questioning their legality and instead advising subordinate commanders and Secretary Hegseth that the proposed actions were permissible before they commenced,” Parnell said.
The Pentagon has not specified the legal basis the administration used to carry out the strikes, however, or disclosed details about its process, including to Congress despite lawmakers’ objections. Hegseth’s team referred questions about DEA’s Mexico proposal back to DEA.
Typically, such action would receive legal approval from the Pentagon’s Office of the General Counsel, which since July has been run by Earl G. Matthews, an attorney and Trump loyalist confirmed by the Senate on a 50-47 party-line vote.
Matthews has served in several positions under Trump, and he is seen as an enthusiastic proponent of the president’s agenda, people familiar with the matter said. Matthews, who did not respond to a request for comment, pledged to lawmakers during his confirmation hearing that if he received Senate approval, he would ensure that Trump’s and Hegseth’s military and policy objectives “are achieved in a manner consistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States.”
Before Matthews’s confirmation, the general counsel’s office was run on an acting basis by Charles L. Young III. Young remains the deputy in the office and has been nominated by Trump to be the general counsel of the Army.
Legal experts have said Trump’s designation of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations has no bearing on the application of international law. Michael Schmitt, a retired Air Force lawyer now working as a law professor at the University of Reading in Britain, said, “There must be an armed attack or an imminent armed attack before a state can resort to self defense under international law.”
In the case of Mexico, there has been a long-running debate over whether the government there is in an armed conflict with the cartels that would allow the use lethal force and request assistance from the United States in doing so. Schmitt said there is a high threshold for declaring an armed conflict. If that threshold is reached and Mexico requested assistance, he added, then the provision of lethal force by the United States would be lawful.
But Mexico has not requested such assistance, Schmitt said, making it “difficult to see a legal justification for unilateral lethal strikes against Mexican cartels by the United States.”
Some Pentagon officials have voiced internal legal concerns about the strikes this month and believe they are being ignored by senior administration officials, people familiar with the matter said, a detail reported Wednesday by the Wall Street Journal. Parnell has disputed that is the case, saying the Pentagon “categorically denies” any Defense Department lawyer has objected.
The discussion about legal authorities comes as Republicans in Congress eye legislation that would authorize Trump specifically to strike at the cartels. One proposal was drafted by Rep. Cory Mills of Florida, and his office has submitted it to the White House for input, he said in an interview with The Washington Post.
The proposal would authorize the military to use “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons the President determines are designated narco-terrorists,” according to draft language reviewed by The Post. It also broadly defines narco-terrorist activity as any involvement with controlled substances that “are linked to terrorism, violence, or threats to national security, public safety, or international stability.”
Samantha Schmidt in Bogotá, and Tara Copp, Kadia Goba and John Hudson in Washington contributed to this report.