President Donald Trump said Oct. 22 that his administration has the legal authority to target vessels suspected of transporting drugs from Venezuela by sea, but may return to Congress if he decides to target suspects on land.
“We’re allowed to do that, and if we do [it] by land, we may go back to Congress,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We will hit them very hard if they come in by land. We’ll probably go back to Congress and explain exactly what we’re doing when we come to the land. We don’t have to do that, but I think … I’d like to do that.”
He said his administration was prepared to target alleged drug traffickers on land, as he said last week.
“Something very serious is going to happen. The equivalent of what’s happening by sea,” Trump said on Oct. 22. “And we’re going to Congress just to tell them what we’re doing, just to keep them informed. But we have to do it for national security. We have to do it to save lives.”
Since September, the U.S. military says it has struck nine drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The latest strike on Oct. 22 was against what the Department of War stated was a drug trafficking boat operating in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has defended the strikes.
“We have every authorization needed. These are designated as foreign terrorist organizations,” Hegseth said in an Oct. 5 interview on Fox News.
The Trump administration has stated that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro runs drug trafficking organizations. Maduro has denied the accusations.
Trump said on Oct. 15 that sea-based trafficking has been “almost totally stopped” and that the government is now looking at land-based trafficking.
“We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” he said during an Oct. 15 press conference with FBI Director Kash Patel.
The following day, the U.S. president said he had authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela.
“I authorized for two reasons, really,” Trump told reporters on Oct. 16. “No. 1, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America. And the other thing, the drugs, we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela, and a lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea.”
In early October, the Trump administration declared drug cartels to be unlawful combatants and stated that the United States is now in an “armed conflict” with them, according to an administration report sent to Congress and obtained by The Epoch Times.
“Although friendly foreign nations have made significant efforts to combat these organizations, suffering significant losses of life, these groups are now transnational and conduct ongoing attacks throughout the Western Hemisphere as organized cartels,” reads the report, obtained by The Epoch Times on Oct. 2.
“Therefore, the President determined these cartels are non-state armed groups, designated them as terrorist organizations, and determined that their actions constitute an armed attack against the United States.”
Ryan Morgan, Joseph Lord, Zachary Stieber, and Reuters contributed to this report.
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