The Administration's New 'War' on Drugs-- Show Me the Evidence!
By Charles A. Ray - October 20, 2025
The
Trump administration continues to up the ante on its naval combat
operations in the Caribbean against alleged drug-smuggling operations,
which administration officials and the president himself claim are
carrying fentanyl to the United States.
Since September 2, there
have been at least five U.S. strikes on small boats off the coast of
Venezuela, killing at least 27 people. Two survivors of an October 16
strike were captured and repatriated to their home countries of Ecuador
and Colombia for ‘detention and prosecution’, according to Trump in a
Truth Social post on October 18.
So far, the administration has
offered no evidence that any of the boats attacked were actually
carrying drugs. U.S. officials have claimed that the boats were carrying
illicit drugs bound for the U.S., and that they were operated by the
Tren de Aragua cartel, which Trump has designated a foreign terrorist
group, in an apparent effort to get around the Congressional
notification requirement before armed attacks.
Legal experts say
that the U.S., despite not being a signatory to the UN Convention on the
Law of the Sea, should ‘act in a manner consistent with its
provisions,’ which state that countries should not interfere with
vessels operating in international waters. The exceptions are that a
country is allowed to seize a vessel that has been chased from its
territorial waters to the high seas. While force can be used to stop
such vessels, generally it is non-lethal, and the force used must be
‘reasonable and necessary.
Article 2(4) of the UN charter allows countries to use force when under attack and deploying the military in self-defense.
None
of that appears to be the case in any of the five attacks so far. In
addition, Trump’s armed conflict with drug cartels is centered on
Venezuela, which is a minor player in smuggling drugs to the United
States, rather than Mexico or Haiti, where most of the organizations
actually operate. And none of these boats were being chased from our own
territorial waters - and there is no evidence that reasonable force was
even contemplated before lethal force was used.
Using the
so-called justification that has been offered so far, any boat in
international waters, anywhere, can be destroyed and its occupants
killed, because they might someday commit a crime in another nation?
Have these decision-makers considered for a moment that this could come
back to harm Americans at sea?
We know so little about what’s
actually going on, other than that people are being killed, and the
administration is offering no evidence to fill the information gap, only
often wildly inaccurate propaganda. There has been zero hard evidence
on the type and quantity of drugs on the boats destroyed. Trump has
claimed that each boat destroyed saves 25,000 American lives, a claim
that does not make sense when records show that 73,000 people died from
drug overdoses between May 2024 and April 2025. If Trump’s claim is
valid, the five boat strikes would have saved nearly double the lives
lost during that period. Someone needs to do the math and provide some
‘real’ evidence.
Legality and proof of drugs intended for the
U.S. aside, another administration action issue that calls this
operation into question is the repatriation of the two survivors of one
strike to Colombia and Ecuador. If these people were part of Tren de
Aragua and engaged in smuggling fentanyl to the U.S., one would think
the administration would be parading them before the press at a minimum.
Instead, we’re left with more questions, questions made all the more
important by Colombian President Gustavo Petro accusing the U.S. of
murdering a Colombian fisherman when it attacked one of the boats.
Rather than providing evidence that the boat actually was carrying
drugs, Trump responded by slashing assistance and imposing new tariffs
on Colombia.
As U.S. actions push us closer to open warfare in
our backyard, it’s time for Congress to pull up its big boy britches and
assert its constitutional authority on executive oversight and the
declaration of war.
The first question Congress needs to ask the administration: Show me the evidence!