Trump Says Military Carried Out 2nd Strike on Venezuelan Boat

President Trump announced that the US military again targeted a boat he says was carrying drugs from Venezuela, killing three aboard the vessel.

• "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," the president said in a Truth Social post.
• "The Strike occurred while these confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela were in International Waters transporting illegal narcotics (A DEADLY WEAPON POISONING AMERICANS!) headed to the U.S.," Trump wrote. "The Strike resulted in 3 male terrorists killed in action. No U.S. Forces were harmed in this Strike."

The strike that Trump says was carried out Monday came two weeks after another military strike on what the Trump administration says was a drug-carrying speedboat from Venezuela that killed 11. The administration justified the earlier strike as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the US. "These extremely violent drug trafficking cartels POSE A THREAT to U.S. National Security, Foreign Policy, and vital U.S. Interests," Trump wrote Monday.

But several senators, Democrats and some Republicans, have indicated dissatisfaction with the administration's rationale and questioned the legality of the action, the AP reports. They view it as a potential overreach of executive authority in part by using the military for law enforcement purposes. "There is no evidence—none—that this strike was conducted in self-defense," Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said last week, per CNN. "That matters, because under both domestic and international law, the US military simply does not have the authority to use lethal force against a civilian vessel unless acting in self-defense."

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Venezuela has denied that the 11 people killed in the earlier strike had links to the Tren de Aragua gang. In a news conference earlier Monday, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro also repudiated what he described as a weekend operation in which 18 Marines raided a Venezuelan fishing boat in the Caribbean. "What were they looking for? Tuna? What were they looking for? A kilo of snapper? Who gave the order in Washington for a missile destroyer to send 18 armed Marines to raid a tuna fishing vessel?" he said. "They were looking for a military incident. If the tuna fishing boys had any kind of weapons and used weapons while in Venezuelan jurisdiction, it would have been the military incident that the warmongers, extremists who want a war in the Caribbean, are seeking."