Deep below the US Capitol, in a secure room meant to protect discussions of American secrets, a wave of sarcastic laughter spread among lawmakers and staff members who were assembled to receive a briefing in late October from senior Pentagon officials.
The Navy rear admiral and a top civilian adviser to the defense secretary had made the trip to Capitol Hill to walk lawmakers through an accelerating string of strikes that to date have now claimed 80 lives. The attacks were part of a campaign the Trump administration says is aimed at disrupting the operations of drug cartels.
But in a meeting the lawmakers expected would center around growing concerns over whether the military had the legal right to kill traffickers without knowing their identities and without trial, the two Pentagon briefers had left something behind: the military lawyers who had been scheduled to attend.
The announcement of the sudden cancellation by the lawyers was immediately seen by some of the lawmakers as a classic stonewalling tactic – with no lawyers around, the Pentagon officials could claim ignorance on legal questions – triggering the wry laughs in the secure room.
But what the Pentagon officials did have to say that day struck several attendees as deeply troubling. It was the way briefers described those killed in the operations – so-called enemy combatants – that seemed to provide evidence that the administration was dusting off the playbook of the drone war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The briefers discussed the strikes against alleged drug boats in nearly identical terms as those carried out in the Middle East during the global war on terror: Killed in Action, target signature, enemy combatants.
“I was like, wait a minute, enemy KIA, what war are we talking about here? What declared conflict am I missing?” one source familiar with the briefing told CNN.
In that and other briefings with lawmakers, military officials have acknowledged they didn’t know the names of those killed, the exact destination of their vehicles or have the documentation to prosecute them for their alleged crimes. But the targets’ actions fit the intelligence of what the briefers referred to as “terrorist” activity and so they were labeled as “enemy KIA,” or killed in action, a phrase used for decades to represent troops perishing on the battlefield.
The US spent more than a decade carrying out attacks, known as “signature strikes,” based on similar rough intelligence profiles as part of its drone campaign in the Middle East. But that campaign occurred during a period when US troops were routinely coming under enemy fire and were facing regular roadside bombings.
US forces operating in and around Latin America have not reported taking fire, and the Pentagon has said no troops have been injured during its recent operations in the region. Nonetheless, the US military has conducted 20 strikes, destroying 21 boats while labeling those killed “narco-terrorists.”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been explicit in drawing the comparison between terrorist groups and drug trafficking operations in Latin America, calling them the “Al-Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere.”
“My advice to foreign terrorist organizations, do not get in a boat,” Hegseth said during a recent speech.
Most of the strikes against boats have used drones designed to carry hellfire missiles, the same combination of hardware that had been the backbone of the signature strike campaign in the Middle East, though CNN has reported that AC-130J gunships have also participated in some of the attacks in Latin America.
US officials have told Congress they do not need to identify individual targets before killing them – mirroring an argument made by past administrations to justify similar strikes against terror networks.
“The risk is that a signature is misinterpreted or erroneous and an innocent party is attacked,” said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and a senior adviser with the CSIS Defense and Security Department.
He described how signature strikes in the Middle East used traits of a target, and how that same logic could be applied to drug boats.
“In the Caribbean, that means that if a vessel exhibits characteristics a, b, and c, then it is presumed to be running drugs,” he said, though he added, “It’s possible that the administration has more direct information and is not releasing that to avoid compromising sources and methods.”
But unlike during the war on terror, the Trump administration lacks Congressional authorization for a sustained military campaign against alleged drug traffickers.
CNN first reported on the existence of an opinion produced by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which legal experts said appears to justify an open-ended war against a secret list of cartels and suspected drug traffickers. The opinion appears designed to give the president power to designate drug traffickers as enemy combatants and have them summarily killed without legal review, those experts said.
Historically, those involved in drug trafficking were considered criminals with due process rights, with the Coast Guard interdicting drug-trafficking vessels and arresting smugglers, a distinction with a very clear difference compared to terror groups that have been targeted in similar strikes.
For now, Trump administration lawyers appear to be relying heavily on the President’s broad Article II authority – the section of the Constitution that outlines the role of the president including their command of the military.
Taken together, the Trump administration is testing the bounds of its authority to wage war abroad – fueling concerns among lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who continue to question the president’s legal justification for the strikes. It has also raised questions as to what lessons the administration and military may or may not have learned from the decadeslong conflict in the Middle East.
The Pentagon did not reply to a request for comment for this story.
“How many briefings have I sat in at this point, where there’s some general or admiral sitting there and giving me vignettes about operations, and talking about the number of people they kill, enemy combatants they kill, their boats they blowing up, or tanks they’re blowing up, and how the mission was a success, and none of them could actually tell me what the strategy and endgame was and how they were going to measure success,” Rep. Jason Crow, a Democrat who is a member of the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, told CNN.
“And, so this is no different. I mean, they have learned nothing from our last 25 years, it seems,” Crow, who also served three tours in Iraq in Afghanistan and was an Army Ranger, added.
While Trump’s broader plan for the counter-drug campaign has not been articulated publicly, top officials have made clear that they intend to continue targeting smugglers using a similar playbook to the one used for killing terrorists.
In practice, current and former US national security officials told CNN the two missions are not so different.
“Network targeting is network targeting,” said one former US intelligence official with knowledge of the administration’s current strategy focused on dismantling drug trafficking groups.
However, the “end state complicates things,” the former official added.
The strikes against alleged drug boats started September 2, announced by President Donald Trump in a post on social media claiming that the boat was being operated by the Tren de Aragua gang. That first strike killed 11, Trump wrote, as he claimed that the gang was being directed by Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.
“TDA is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western Hemisphere,” Trump wrote.
That was a theme in the early wave of strikes, as the Trump administration tried to tie Maduro to drug trafficking – namely fentanyl – while attacking boats near the Venezuelan coast in the Caribbean. It coincided with a massive buildup of military assets in the Caribbean, which now includes the Ford Carrier Strike Group and has raised questions about whether the US intends to strike inside Venezuela and potentially try to oust Maduro.
While those tensions continue to simmer, the boat strike campaign began to expand to the Pacific Ocean in late October, shifting focus from fentanyl to stopping the movement of cocaine. The announced targets also got less specific. Nearly all of the subsequent strikes including that first in the Pacific were against a “designated terrorist organization,” as announced by Hegseth, mirroring Global War on Terror framing of attacks.
The Pentagon has deliberately shifted its strategy in recent weeks to striking suspected narcotraffickers in the eastern Pacific Ocean, rather than the Caribbean Sea, because administration officials believe they have stronger evidence linking cocaine transport to the US from those western routes, CNN also reported.
The intelligence suggests that cocaine is far more likely to be trafficked from Colombia or Mexico, rather than Venezuela, the sources said, raising more questions about the true purpose of the US military buildup in the Caribbean Sea.
But the shift to strikes in the Pacific has led to concerns from other countries in Latin America that the boat strike campaign signals a broadening that could only continue.
Mexico has long been viewed by US officials as an epicenter of the drug trade, and Trump, himself, has repeatedly inquired about sending American troops across the southern border to target cartels based there.
Trump’s previous offers to send US forces into Mexico have been rebuffed, but the ongoing US military strikes have added a new wrinkle to the already delicate relationship between the two countries, as seen by an unexpected phone call on October 27.
The Mexican Navy got a call from the Pentagon that day informing officials there may be a survivor in the Pacific Ocean from a US strike.
The call — and the strike prompting it — surprised Mexico as US officials had provided no advance warning. While still in international waters, the incident happened near Mexico’s coast immediately raising concerns about the expansion of the US counter-narcotic strategy.
The two other known survivors from earlier strikes were briefly detained on a US Navy ship but ultimately repatriated to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia – amid questions about the legality of holding them, according to sources.
In Mexico City after the October 27 call, senior Mexican officials scheduled a meeting with the US ambassador to try to understand why Mexico, a close US partner working with the US on counter-drug operations already, was not aware of the strike and what to expect moving forward. A readout of the meeting described it as cordial and “aimed to strengthen bilateral coordination between Mexico and the Unted States on maritime matters.”
Weeks later, the Mexican Navy has not located the survivor from that strike after having called off its formal search and the unnamed person is now presumed dead.
For its part, Mexico has responded to Trump’s focus on the drug trade and framing of terrorist networks driving the trade by trying to placate the Trump administration with numbers— an effort begun well before the strikes commenced. In calls between Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Trump, Sheinbaum has kept the US president updated on progress and metrics as it relates to crime. Trump administration officials said that the two leaders have developed a good relationship, despite Sheinbaum’s public opposition to the administration’s boat strikes, and continue to work together on multiple fronts.
The Mexican Embassy in Washington declined to comment for this story.
Earlier this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that countries cooperatively working with the US on drug smuggling efforts should not be concerned about unilateral US strikes on smugglers from their nations.
“They’re going to help us find these people and blow them up if that’s what it takes. They’re going to help us with it,” Rubio said.
While there are strengths to effectively conducting a counter-terrorism mission at the US border, namely using the full power of the US intelligence community and military to identify vulnerabilities within these various groups, multiple current and former officials told CNN there are also obvious pitfalls.
Those include issues related to collateral damage and managing political outrage from countries that are increasingly concerned the US may violate their sovereignty by conducting lethal strikes within their borders.
Those are similar challenges to what US officials grappled with during the global war on terror.
The former US intelligence official compared the US-Mexico dynamic to that of dealing with Pakistan during that time. Initially, the US refrained from conducting unilateral operations inside Pakistan’s borders, spending years asking for permission before carrying out strikes against suspected terrorists.
Pakistan never said no, the former official said, and the US eventually moved into a phase of simply notifying the country rather than asking for permission before a strike.
Unlike Pakistan, however, the Mexican government has repeatedly said no to Trump when he has raised the prospect of deploying the US military inside the country to target drug groups.
Senior US intelligence officials have insisted that they are collaborating with the Mexican government when it comes to countering the flow of drugs and that any military or covert action carried out across the border will not be done unilaterally.
But that has done little to ease the concerns of Mexican officials who believe that decision, ultimately, lies solely with the President.
While all of the strikes to date have been at sea targeting boats allegedly carrying drugs, lawyers in the Trump administration have been debating potential justifications to extend those strikes to land, a US official said.
One strategy they have debated would be to identify land targets the US believes to be associated with drug trafficking and justifying those strikes with a second legal opinion that declares the host country unable or unwilling to address an imminent threat to Americans, sources familiar with the administration’s thinking said. Another possibility is to add Mexican cartels to an existing, secret list of 24 cartels and criminal organizations that the administration argues are legitimate targets. There’s no indication that a decision to conduct land strikes has been made.
Still, the ongoing strikes in international waters are straining relations between the US and allies.
The United Kingdom is no longer sharing intelligence with the US about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in US military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal, CNN has reported.
The UK’s decision marks a significant break from its closest ally and intelligence sharing partner and underscores the growing skepticism over the legality of the US military’s campaign around Latin America.
In response to CNN’s reporting, Columbia President Gustavo Petro announced that he had ordered the country’s security forces to suspend intelligence sharing with US security agencies until the US stops the strikes.
It was the escalation of a public spat between Trump and Petro, who in Columbia leads a country that has been a critical partner in US efforts to combat drugs.
That dispute reached a fever pitch when one of the two survivors of US strikes who is Colombian was repatriated.
The man was subsequently released by Colombian authorities due to a lack of evidence that he was an alleged trafficker, according to Petro, who has continued to question the US strategy of shoot-first and ask questions later.
“Colombia’s prosecutor’s office, independent of the government, cannot investigate without evidence. Thousands of people we captured on boats with the seized cocaine are tried in Colombia, but the method of killing them and not seizing the evidence does not allow for trials; at most, only bodies are collected, without really knowing what they were transporting,” Petro posted on social media.
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