U.S. Strikes a 2nd Venezuela Boat, Killing 3, Trump Says

The president said the vessel was heading to the United States, but he did not offer details about its location. Legal specialists condemned the action as illegal.

The U.S. military struck a boat for the second time this month, President Trump said on Monday, as his administration continued its deadly campaign against Venezuelan drug cartels that it has accused of bringing fentanyl into the United States.

The strike occurred in international waters and killed three people, Mr. Trump said in a social media post.

“This morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a SECOND Kinetic Strike against positively identified, extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels and narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” Mr. Trump wrote, referring to the U.S. military’s Southern Command.

Mr. Trump claimed that the boat was heading to the United States and linked it to “drug trafficking cartels” that he said posed a threat to the country. The president said the people killed were “positively identified,” but he did not identify a specific organization with which they were alleged to be associated.

Mr. Trump also posted a 27-second video on social media that edited together several clips of aerial surveillance. It showed a speedboat bobbing in the water, before a fiery explosion engulfed the vessel. It was unclear what was on the boat.

The Pentagon on Monday offered no other details on the strike, referring to Mr. Trump’s social media post, although a Defense Department official separately said it was a Special Operations strike.

Legal specialists condemned the U.S. military action as illegal, as they had a similar first American attack on another vessel on Sept. 2.

“Trump is normalizing what I consider to be an unlawful strike,” said Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, a retired top judge advocate general for the Navy from 2000 to 2002.

Earlier on Monday, before Mr. Trump announced the new strike, Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro condemned the Sept. 2 attack as a “heinous crime” and “a military attack on civilians who were not at war and were not militarily threatening any country.” He said if the United States believed that the boat’s passengers were drug traffickers they should have been arrested, and accused the administration of trying to start a war.

Mr. Trump in July signed a still-secret order directing the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American criminal gangs and drug cartels. His administration also began stepping up rhetorical attacks on Mr. Maduro. And in August, the U.S. Navy sent a heavy amount of firepower into the southern Caribbean Sea.

On Sept. 2, in what appeared to be the first act carrying out Mr. Trump’s directive, the United States conducted a deadly military strike on a boat that had left Venezuelan waters. Announcing the strike, Mr. Trump said that the boat was carrying drugs for a gang and that 11 people were killed.

The U.S. military has not said what it has been using to attack the boats. The U.S. Navy has eight warships in the Caribbean, and the Pentagon has ordered armed MQ-9 Reaper drones and F-35 fighter jets, among other aircraft, to Puerto Rico. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made an unannounced visit to Puerto Rico last week.

Congressional Democrats on Monday assailed Mr. Trump’s order.

“President Trump’s actions are an outrageous violation of the law and a dangerous assault on our Constitution,” said Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. “No president can secretly wage war or carry out unjustified killings — that is authoritarianism, not democracy.”

The Trump administration has not offered a detailed legal theory about why it is lawful — and not murder or a war crime — to summarily kill people who are suspected of a crime when the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard could instead have interdicted their boats and potentially arrested them for prosecution, as they have long done in the Caribbean.

But it has gestured at the outlines of a theory by arguing that drug smuggling amounts to an imminent threat at a time when some 100,000 Americans die each year from drug overdoses and saying that Mr. Trump has directed strikes at such vessels as a matter of national self-defense.

The White House also asserted that the first strike was consistent with the laws of armed conflict.

Specialists in the laws about use of force have strongly rejected that idea, noting that the crime of drug smuggling has never been seen as equivalent to an imminent armed attack that can trigger a right to use lethal force in self-defense, and that Congress has not authorized any armed conflict with drug cartels.

“The administration has not even seriously tried to present a legal argument to justify the premeditated killing of the people aboard these two vessels,” said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and specialist in the laws of armed conflict who has written critically about Mr. Trump’s earlier strike. “The U.S. president does not have a license to kill suspected drug smugglers on that basis alone.”

Top Trump administration officials — including Mr. Hegseth and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser — said after the first attack that there would be more. But amid the wave of criticism that Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth had given an illegal order, it had not been clear that would happen.

On Saturday, Venezuela’s government said that the U.S. Navy had, a day earlier, interdicted a fishing boat and detained nine fishermen for eight hours before letting them go. A Defense Department official later confirmed the basics of that incident, adding that Coast Guard law enforcement officials had boarded the boat.

Despite Venezuela’s complaints, the incident looked like a return to the normal means that the U.S. government has used in dealing with suspected drug smugglers. The suspicions the vessel was carrying drugs apparently proved unfounded, so the Navy and the Coast Guard let the people go without killing anyone.

The Trump administration has deemed several Latin American criminal gangs and drug cartels to be “terrorist” organizations — a move that broke new ground since they are motivated by illicit profit rather than ideological goals. On that contested basis, he and his aides have taken to referring to suspected drug smugglers as “narco-terrorists.”

In an interview with Newsmax released on Monday, Mr. Trump’s top counterterrorism adviser, Sebastian Gorka, said that obtaining congressional authorization to use armed force against drug cartels was not possible because they are not nation-states. He did not explain why Congress was able to do that when it authorized armed force against Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Mr. Gorka, echoing comments by Mr. Rubio, also pointed to the fact that the Trump administration had designated several groups as “foreign terrorist organizations” or F.T.O.s.

“What we are saying is: This is a war, the cartel started it and we’re declaring war on you,” Mr. Gorka said. “Now, that’s difficult to do because they’re not a nation-state. So the closest we can get to that is to use the F.T.O. designation, that you are an exigent threat to the United States, you are killing Americans in mass numbers, therefore we will take the fight to you.”

As a matter of legal reality, the laws that enable the executive branch to designate foreign groups as “terrorists” authorize economic sanctions, like freezing assets. They do not convey legal authority to use wartime force — killing suspected associates of such groups as if they were wartime combatants on a battlefield — against them.

The second strike came after The New York Times reported that the boat destroyed on Sept. 2 had altered its course and appeared to have turned around before the attack started because the people onboard had apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking it, according to American officials familiar with the matter.

A 29-second video Mr. Trump released in announcing the Sept. 2 attack showed a speedboat in the water from different vantage points, with several people onboard before a fiery explosion engulfed the vessel. But the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the clip had not shown the whole story, including the boat turning around and the repeated strikes on it even after it was disabled.

Legal specialists like Admiral Guter have said the apparent turning around of the boat further undermined the case using lethal force against it as self-defense.

Defense Department officials briefed some staff members and lawmakers with the Senate and House Armed Services Committees last week. Several of the officials said that the administration did not offer evidence of legal justification, other than Mr. Trump’s assertion of “self-defense” for the first deadly strike.

Mary Ellen O’Connell, a University of Notre Dame professor of international law, said the new strike “appears as problematic as the first” and questioned whether Mr. Trump really knew who and what were on the boat, and where it was going.

“International lawyers uniformly found his first such attack on Sept. 2 unlawful,” she said. “All of the criticism and warning of blowback has had no impact. People are dead again in killings that violate the law.”

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday night, Mr. Trump complained about the flow of drugs out of Venezuela, which he attributed to the group Tren de Aragua.

“They’re trying to get out, but we’re stopping them successfully at the border,” he said.

He called Tren de Aragua, which the State Department in February designated a foreign terrorist organization, “probably the worst gang in the world.”

The president has repeatedly alleged that Tren de Aragua is headed by Mr. Maduro. The U.S. intelligence community does not believe that assertion is accurate, according to a memorandum declassified in May.

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