U.S. Deploys Aircraft Carrier to Latin America as Drug Operation Expands

The Trump administration has acknowledged 10 strikes on suspected drug-smuggling boats from South America, which have killed 43 people.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the deployment of the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford as well as its accompanying warships and attack planes to waters off Latin America, the Pentagon said on Friday, in a dramatic escalation of military might in the region.

The enhanced American presence “will bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States homeland and our security in the Western Hemisphere,” Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said on social media.

Mr. Parnell did not say when the Ford, the Navy’s most modern and technologically advanced carrier, would be moving to the region or where it would be positioned. Navy officials said on Friday that the Ford is currently steaming off the coast of Croatia on a monthslong European deployment and would take seven to 10 days, depending on speed and weather conditions, to reach its new assigned mission with U.S. Southern Command.

Since late August, the U.S. military has deployed about 10,000 troops to the Caribbean, about half of them on eight warships and half in Puerto Rico, for what the administration says is a counterterrorism and counternarcotics mission. The Ford carries about 5,000 sailors and has more than 75 attack, surveillance and support aircraft, including F/A-18 fighters.

Aircraft carriers have toured the waters in the Caribbean and off Latin America before on what the Navy calls “good will” tours. But cutting short the Ford’s scheduled deployment by several months and redirecting it to Latin America for a possible combat mission amid the intensifying U.S. strikes on boats the administration says are carrying drugs is highly unusual, current and former Navy officials said.

“By adding the Ford to the already existing forces, this is a uniquely powerful naval combat group in the Caribbean in my memory,” said Adm. James Stavridis, a former head of U.S. Southern Command, now retired.

For decades, Republican and Democratic presidents have dispatched one or more aircraft carriers to the Middle East as a sign of U.S. military power and of American geopolitical resolve. President Trump’s second administration has focused more intently on securing the U.S. homeland and the Western Hemisphere. The deployment of the Ford to the region, which officials said had been under consideration for weeks, underscores that shift in national security priorities.

The new Pentagon orders came hours after Mr. Hegseth announced that the U.S. military had killed six people on a boat suspected of smuggling drugs from South America, as the Trump administration’s lethal and legally disputed campaign continued to escalate.

The latest attack raised the death toll from the Trump administration’s campaign on suspected drug boats to 43 in 10 known strikes — eight in the Caribbean and two more this week in the eastern Pacific.

Mr. Hegseth said in a post on social media that the strike had taken place overnight in international waters in the Caribbean Sea. He added that the vessel was “operated by” Tren de Aragua, one of several Latin American criminal groups that the administration has designated as terrorist organizations.

The defense secretary offered no evidence to support his claim but cited “our intelligence.” As with statements about previous strikes, his message contained a grainy, 20-second video clip of a boat bobbing in the water, then disappearing in an explosion.

A broad range of outside legal specialists have said that Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have been giving illegal orders to the military because it is forbidden under domestic and international law to deliberately target civilians who are not directly participating in hostilities — even if they are suspected criminals.

The United States has traditionally addressed maritime drug smuggling by using the Coast Guard, sometimes assisted by the Navy, to intercept boats. If suspicions proved accurate, it would arrest their crews. In the same way, the police arrest people who are suspected of being drug dealers; it would be a crime to instead summarily kill them in the street.

The penalty for being convicted of drug trafficking is prison time, not execution.

The Trump administration has asserted that the attacks are lawful — and are not murder — because Mr. Trump has “determined” that drug trafficking by cartels constitutes an armed attack on the United States and that the country is engaged in a formal armed conflict with the cartels, so boat crews can be targeted as “combatants.”

But the administration has not provided a legal theory in public or to Congress to explain how it is legitimate for Mr. Trump to bridge the conceptual gulf between drug trafficking and the kind of armed attacks that can create a legal state of armed conflict. Nor has it explained how crewing a boat carrying an illicit consumer product can make someone a lawful target as a combatant.

In the absence of a legal argument, the administration has made a policy argument. It has said it is in favor of using military force against suspected drug runners because tens of thousands of American drug users die from overdoses each year. Mr. Trump has repeatedly said that each boat the U.S. military destroys saves 25,000 lives.

About 80,000 American drug users died from overdoses last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number is down from 110,000 in 2023 but higher than it was a decade ago.

The rise in overdose deaths in recent years was caused by fentanyl, which comes from labs in Mexico. The boats that the U.S. military attacked were coming from South America, which produces cocaine.

Since returning to office in January, Mr. Trump has designated a series of Latin American drug cartels and criminal gangs, including Tren de Aragua, as terrorist organizations. Mr. Hegseth has repeatedly compared them to Al Qaeda.

Congress authorized an armed conflict with Al Qaeda after it attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001; lawmakers have not authorized a war on unrelated other terrorist groups. The designations are also disputed since by definition, terrorists are motivated by ideological or religious goals, while cartels seek illicit profits.

The law that empowers the executive branch to designate a group as a foreign terrorist organization permits freezing its assets and also makes it a crime to provide support to that group. What it does not do is authorize the summary killing of people suspected of being members of the group.

Mr. Hegseth’s description of the 10th attack as targeting a boat associated with Tren de Aragua refocused the operation on Venezuela. Mr. Trump described the first strike, on Sept. 2, as killing 11 people he accused of having been members of that gang. The second strike, on Sept. 15, killed three people he said were from Venezuela.

But President Gustavo Petro of Colombia said one of the people killed on Sept. 15 was a Colombian fisherman and accused the United States of murder. For subsequent strikes, the administration largely did not identify a nationality or membership of the targets in a particular organization.

In a fourth strike, on Oct. 3, the U.S. military killed four men who Mr. Petro later said were Colombian citizens. The sixth strike, on a semi-submersible vessel, killed two people but had two survivors, one of whom was repatriated to Colombia.

The seventh strike, on Oct. 17, killed three men the administration accused of smuggling drugs for the National Liberation Army, a Marxist rebel group in Colombia known as the E.L.N., which the State Department designated as terrorists in 1997. The eighth and ninth strikes were in the eastern Pacific, off the coast of Colombia.

In the buildup to the boat strikes operation as well as in its opening phase, the Trump administration largely focused on Venezuela and its authoritarian leader, President Nicolás Maduro, who has been indicted in the United States on drug trafficking charges. The administration has called him illegitimate and portrayed him as the head of a drug cartel.

The Trump administration is also considering options for land strikes in Venezuela and trying to use force to remove Mr. Maduro. Proponents of a regime-change operation include Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe.

The U.S. military has prepared a list of drug facilities in Venezuela that it could strike, and presented the package to Mr. Trump, according to U.S. officials briefed on the deliberations.

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational plans, emphasized that Mr. Trump had not made any firm decisions on whether or how to escalate the operations against the drug facilities. The New York Times and other publications have reported that Mr. Trump is weighing strikes inside Venezuela; CNN reported earlier that those targets include drug facilities.

Military officials said on Friday that announcing the unusual deployment of the carrier to the region was one more step in that escalating pressure campaign against Mr. Maduro.

Julian E. Barnes and Tyler Pager contributed reporting.

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