The US killed four people in a strike against a vessel just off the coast of Venezuela that was allegedly carrying illegal drugs, US defense secretary Pete Hegseth said on Friday.
The strike came a day after Trump officials notified Congress that the US was entering a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels.
It was at least the fourth such extraordinary and controversial attack by US forces outside American waters in recent weeks. Hegseth, said in a social media post that he had directed the latest strike on Trump’s orders.
Hegseth wrote that the boat was struck in international waters off the coast of Venezuela and that an intelligence assessment had confirmed it was carrying drugs bound for the US.
“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,” Hegseth said on X.
“Our intelligence, without a doubt, confirmed that this vessel was trafficking narcotics, the people onboard were narco-terrorists, and they were operating on a known narco-trafficking transit route,” Hegseth said.
The latest attack on a boat comes as the Trump administration provided a notification on the issue to Congress in the form of a memo that attempted to legally justify the increasingly expansive use of military force against alleged Venezuelan drug boats.
The notification was provided by senior Pentagon officials as part of an attempt to explain the Trump administration’s legal arguments for the strikes. It also included a classified briefing to members of the Senate armed services committee that took place on Wednesday.
The memo also states that Trump has deemed cartels as “non-state armed groups” whose actions smuggling drugs “constitute an armed attack against the United States”. The administration is required by law to report to Congress the US government’s use of armed forces.
Hegseth’s social media post claimed the boat was “affiliated with Designated Terrorist Organizations”, a term the administration introduced for the first time in the confidential memo to Congress reviewed by the Guardian.
Until this week, the administration has referred to Tren de Aragua and other cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, or FTO. Legal experts suggested that simply characterizing drugs cartels as an FTO did not give the administration any additional authority to use lethal force.
Broadly, White House officials have sought to justify the strikes internally and externally by claiming Trump was exercising his article II powers, which allows the president to use military force in self-defense in limited engagements.
The self-defense argument revolves around Trump’s designation of Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization, a claim advanced by Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, in order to defend the deportations of dozens of Venezuelans earlier this year under the Alien Enemies Act.
The administration claimed that Tren de Aragua had infiltrated the regime of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro – and so the presence of the cartel’s members in the US amounted to a “predatory incursion” by a foreign nation, allowing for the deportation of any Venezuelan national.
But the administration has yet to provide concrete evidence that Tren de Aragua has become an instrument of the Venezuelan government, and legal experts contacted for this story said the White House could only justify the strikes if it could make that showing.
The previous strikes trikes on three boats in the Caribbean have killed 17 people and triggered widespread international outrage. Hegseth added in his social media post: “These strikes will continue until the attacks on the American people are over!!!!”
The strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug boats have largely been overseen by Miller and Tony Salisbury, his top lieutenant at the White House homeland security council (HSC), the Guardian has previously reported.
Miller empowered the HSC earlier this year to become its own entity in Donald Trump’s second term, a notable departure from previous administrations where it was considered part of the national security council and ultimately reported to the national security adviser.
That was the case, for instance, with the second Venezuelan boat hit with hellfire missiles on 15 September. While the White House was informed the Pentagon had identified the boat as a viable target more than four days before, many top White House officials only learned of the impending strike hours before it happened.
