The U.S. has launched a lethal strike on a fourth alleged drug smuggling boat from Venezuela, killing four people on board and vowing there will be more attacks to come.
Amid growing international skepticism about the strikes—including some calls for President Donald Trump to be criminally investigated over them—Pentagon boss Pete Hegseth announced that yet another one had taken place off the coast of Venezuela on Friday morning.
“Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike, and no U.S. forces were harmed in the operation,” Hegseth wrote in an X post, which included footage of the attack.
“The strike was conducted in international waters just off the coast of Venezuela while the vessel was transporting substantial amounts of narcotics—headed to America to poison our people.”
The latest strike takes the total number of people killed by the Trump administration as part of its campaign against “narco-terrorists” to 21.
But while the administration claims its actions are intended to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S, very little proof of who or what was on board in any of the four cases has been provided.
Sanho Tree, a global drug policy expert at the Institute for Policy Studies, also warned that Trump had effectively started an endless war because the drug trade did not have an organizational structure or international high command—“so if one cartel gets killed, an infinite number of others will appear.”
“Trump trying to apply this new military doctrine against an enemy who is quite literally incapable of surrender is, by its very definition, a forever war,” Tree told the Daily Beast.
Friday’s strike came after Trump quietly determined that the U.S. is now in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels.
The cartels have been classified by the administration as “non-state armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States.”
“Based upon the cumulative effects of these hostile acts against the citizens and interests of the United States and friendly foreign nations, the president determined that the United States is in a non-international armed conflict with these designated terrorist organizations,” the White House said in a memo sent to Congress committees this week.
The declaration that the U.S. is at war with a new enemy was intended to give Trump more authority through a formal legal framework to take military action against forces America views as “unlawful.”
But some viewed it as a dramatic escalation, because “armed conflict” under international law allows countries to kill enemies even if they pose no threat, detain them without due process and prosecute them in military courts under different standards than civilian courts.
“Every American should be alarmed that Pres Trump has decided he can wage secret wars against anyone he labels an enemy,” said Democrat Jack Reed, a ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Announcing the latest strike on X on Friday, Hegseth did not give more details about the attack, and only claimed that intelligence “confirmed that this vessel was trafficking narcotics, the people onboard were narco-terrorists, and they were operating on a known narco-trafficking transit route.”
“These strikes will continue until the attacks on the American people are over!!!!” he added.
But many remain unconvinced of the legality of the strikes.
“Killing civilians that likely aren’t even engaging in prosecutable crimes under American law over 1000 miles away is murder,” U.S. veteran and former trial lawyer John Jackson wrote on X.
“You’re just slaughtering poverty-stricken people and doing nothing about the drug flows into the U.S.
Last week Colombia’s left-wing president Gustavo Petro also rejected America’s justification and said Trump’s actions were akin to “murder.”
“There must be criminal charges opened against those officials of the United States, including the senior official who gave the order: President Trump, who allowed missiles to be fired against young people who simply wanted to escape poverty,” he told the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
