IT IS A fundamental concept of justice that someone suspected of a crime should receive due process: Knowledge of their alleged offense. The ability to plead their case. A fair trial.
Yet on Sept. 2, the U.S. military launched a lethal drone strike on a boat traveling through the Caribbean Sea. All 11 people on board were killed. No charge, no trial. Just execution. Since then, we’ve seen an escalating U.S. military campaign that has killed dozens of individuals from countries such as Colombia, Ecuador, Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela. The Trump administration alleges that the individuals are smuggling drugs, but since there was no due process, we don’t know.
These strikes are leaving mothers without their sons and creating widows and orphans in their wake. The New York Times reported that “Chad Joseph, a 26-year-old from Trinidad and Tobago who had been living in Venezuela in recent months, told his family he would soon be taking a short boat ride back home.” He never arrived. The wife of another victim said that her husband, a fisherman, had “gone to work one day and had never returned.”
President Trump’s response has been callous and defiant. He has asserted to Congress that he has “determined” that drug smugglers are “nonstate armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States.” So, he can strike as he pleases. “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay?” Trump told CNN in late October. “We’re going to kill them, you know, they’re going to be like, dead.” So far, more than 83 people have been killed.
History will condemn this administration’s actions. In the meantime, this extraordinarily illegal conduct by the U.S. president has extraordinary consequences—both abroad and at home.
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION has made various claims to support the legality of these attacks in the Caribbean. None of them stand up to scrutiny.
First, the administration claims that the U.S. is in an “armed conflict”—the technical term for “war”—with certain drug cartels and that those targeted are “unlawful combatants” who can be killed as a matter of first resort. But the U.S. is not in an armed conflict with drug cartels. This is not something that the president can unilaterally determine. Saying so does not make it so.
To be in an armed conflict, a nonstate group must be engaged in protracted armed violence and be “organized” to a level where it can conduct military operations as a state would—akin to al-Qaida or ISIS. That is not the case in the Caribbean Sea. Latin American drug cartels, though violent and despicable, are not engaged in armed violence against the United States. Members of these groups may be committing crimes, but they are civilians. They are not combatants in a war.
The legal term for these actions is murder.
The administration has designated certain groups as “foreign terrorist organizations” or “specially designated global terrorists,” but neither designation authorizes the use of lethal force. Rather, they permit the U.S. to deport members of these groups, freeze their assets, or prosecute them for providing material support to terrorism. There are dozens of FTO-designated groups, including in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Ireland. The U.S. is not at war with groups in these countries. It is also not at war with any FTO-designated drug cartels in Latin America.
At best, the individuals targeted by these strikes are criminal suspects. That means they should be arrested and prosecuted, which the U.S. has been doing for many years by interdicting boats suspected of trafficking drugs. Instead, the Trump administration has been summarily executing civilian criminal suspects without attempting to arrest and prosecute them. The legal term for these actions is murder.
It could be easy to see these strikes and the administration’s claims of war authority as another manifestation of more than two decades of the executive branch’s targeted killing of “bad guys” in the post-9/11 era. Isn’t this just the Latin American franchise of the so-called “War on Terror”?
No. These latest strikes are manifestly different. The post-9/11 wars, flawed as many of them were, have been against organized armed groups and involved protracted armed violence, thus meeting the threshold for war with a nonstate group.
The Trump administration’s strikes on boats in international waters are not “war.” They are premeditated killing of human beings. The president has put the U.S. service members conducting these strikes in an untenable position. He is commanding them to obey illegal orders and forcing them to risk moral injury from their actions, much like that suffered by soldiers from Vietnam to Afghanistan.
If one accepts the claim that the U.S. is at war with certain drug cartels, then this would permit the administration to target suspected members of those cartels inside the United States.
WHILE INITIALLY MUTED in their response, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have pushed back against Trump’s unlawful killings in the Caribbean. Senators Adam Schiff, Tim Kaine, and Rand Paul and Reps. Jason Crow and Ilhan Omar have introduced bicameral measures to end the illegal strikes under the War Powers Resolution of 1973.
In a powerful floor speech, Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, lambasted the “blow-them-to-smithereens crowd,” and cautioned that a “republic that allows its Executive to kill without law is a republic in deep peril.”
Opposition has risen from former government officials and even trickled out of the Department of Defense. The Army Times ran an anonymous op-ed by a Pentagon civilian employee who implored service members to recognize that “the U.S. is setting up a dangerous precedent that could, in the long run, hurt the U.S. and advantage adversaries.”
The Catholic bishops of the Antilles also released a denunciation of the administration’s actions in their region. They recognized the drug trade as “a grave crisis” that “we are duty-bound to confront.” But, the bishops warned, “the arbitrary and unwarranted taking of life cannot be justified as a means of resolution. Such acts violate the sacredness of human life.” Securing borders and eliminating the narcotics trade must be pursued with “respect for the law, the dignity of human life and with a tacit understanding of our region’s deep commitment to peace,” they wrote.
With Trump already improperly invoking the wartime Alien Enemies Act to conduct mass deportations, deploying national guard troops to U.S. cities, and talking of a “war from within,” it is appropriate to be concerned that he might use “war powers” domestically—on us, here at home. It is critical that Congress and the American people push back against these illegal strikes and this unprecedented war framework.
Heather Brandon-Smith is legislative director for foreign policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
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