The U.S. military killed nearly a dozen people in a small speedboat allegedly carrying narcotics from Venezuela, President Trump said Tuesday at the White House, echoed shortly afterward by a
tweet from his secretary of state.
Trump posted video of the lethal encounter on his social media account, claiming U.S. troops “positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility” and carried out the strike “while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States.”
“The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action,” the president wrote, adding, “Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America.”
The Pentagon didn’t have much more to say about the encounter, telling reporters in a short statement on Tuesday, “As the President announced today, we can confirm the U.S. military conducted a precision strike against a drug vessel operated by a designated narco-terrorist organization. More information will be made available at a later time.”
But: A U.S. official later told the New York Times “either an attack helicopter or an MQ-9 Reaper drone…carried out the attack on Tuesday morning against a four-engine speedboat loaded with drugs.”
Rolling deep: The U.S. has nearly 7,000 troops and more than a half-dozen warships in the region, including a submarine and at least three Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyers—USS Gravely, USS Jason Dunham and the USS Sampson—ostensibly to fight drug trafficking from Venezuela. More than 2,000 troops from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit recently arrived. P-8 maritime patrol planes are also operating nearby, as well as troops aboard the USS San Antonio, USS Iwo Jima, and USS Fort Lauderdale. Some of the Navy ships “can carry aerial assets like helicopters while others can also deploy Tomahawk cruise missiles,” Reuters reports. “U.S. surveillance aircraft and other sensors had been monitoring cartel maritime traffic for weeks before the strike,” a U.S. official told the Times.
No known authorization: Congress has passed no Authorization for Use of Military Force for such action, nor has the White House invoked the War Powers Act—which begs the question: on what legal authority do these lethal actions proceed?
Second opinion: “‘Not yielding to pursuers’ or [being] ‘suspected of carrying drugs’ doesn't carry a death sentence,” noted Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America, writing Tuesday on social media.
Also notable: Despite Trump’s claim that the “terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States,” Rubio told reporters later that “These particular drugs were probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean.”
Coverage continues below…
Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1954, the First Taiwan Strait Crisis erupted when military forces from the People's Republic of China began shelling multiple islands around Taiwan.
Update: Trump can’t use the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Tren de Aragua gang members, a three-judge panel from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday.
Implications: “The decision bars deportations from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi,” the Associated Press writes. However, “The ruling can be appealed to the full 5th Circuit or directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is likely to make the ultimate decision on the issue.”
“We find no invasion or predatory incursion,” the judges said, and explained, “A country’s encouraging its residents and citizens to enter this country illegally is not the modern-day equivalent of sending an armed, organized force to occupy, to disrupt, or to otherwise harm the United States.” They also clarified, “our injunction solely applies to the use of the war-related federal statute and does not impede use of any other statutory authority for removing foreign terrorists.”
Expert reax: The judges observed “that the law is fundamentally about war and about military actions; not illegal immigration or drug trafficking,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council.
Also new: The Pentagon just authorized up to 600 military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges, AP reported Tuesday in what one law professor described as a “Blatant way to further militarize immigration enforcement.”
Context: “[M]ore than 100 immigration judges have been fired or left voluntarily after taking deferred resignations offered by the Trump administration” and “at least 17 immigration judges had been fired ‘without cause’ in courts across the country,” AP’s Konstantin Toropin writes. “That has left about 600 immigration judges, union figures show, meaning the Pentagon move would double their ranks” amid a backlog of more than 3 million cases.
Second opinion: “Expecting fair decisions from judges unfamiliar with the law is absurd,” said Ben Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. The decision “makes as much sense as having a cardiologist do a hip replacement.” More, here.
Troops in US streets
A judge ruled Tuesday that Trump's National Guard deployment to California was illegal, and shared his concerns about a president acting as a national police chief.
The judge said the roughly 4,700 Guard members and Marines engaged in police activity in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which he said built on the constitutional framers’ wariness of a centralized military force conducting police work, Jacob Fischler reports for States Newsroom.
“Contrary to Congress’s explicit instruction, federal troops executed the laws,” the judge wrote in his opinion (PDF). “Defendants systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles. In short, Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act.”
He also said he’s concerned that Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth want to expand the role of National Guard troops for law enforcement, noting the two “have stated their intention to call National Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country… thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief.” He continued, “Indeed, resentment of Britain’s use of military troops as a police force was manifested in the Declaration of Independence, where one of the American colonists’ grievances was that the King had ‘affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.’”
Fine print: The ruling only applies to California.
Next steps: Trump is likely to appeal the ruling to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, where he won a victory early in the case, Fischler writes. Read more, here.
Trump seemed to spurn the ruling Tuesday, and vowed to deploy National Guard troops to fight crime in Chicago. “We're going in. I didn't say when, but we're going in,” the president said Tuesday at the White House. Trump’s vow is “likely to trigger a legal battle with local officials,” Reuters reported afterward.
Developing: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker claims Texas National Guard troops are preparing for some kind of immigration-related operation around Chicago. “We have reason to believe that the Trump administration has already begun staging the Texas National Guard for deployment in Illinois,” the governor said Tuesday afternoon.
“In the coming days, we expect to see what has played out in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., to happen here in Chicago,” Pritzker said Tuesday. “It is likely those agents will be with ICE, Customs and Border Patrol, the Department of Homeland Security, and other similarly situated federal agencies. Many of these individuals are being relocated from Los Angeles for deployment in Chicago. We believe that staging that has already begun started yesterday, and continues into today.”
“This is not about crime,” Pritzker said. “More and more reports around these raids include people who were stopped or detained because of how they look, and not because of any threat to the public…Let's be clear, the terror and cruelty is the point, not the safety of anyone living here.”
Local opposition: “[Trump] just wants his own secret police force that will do publicity stunts whenever his poll numbers are sinking, whenever his jobs report shows a stagnating economy, whenever he needs another distraction from his failures,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a statement Tuesday.
Additional opposition: “The administration is clearly exceeding its constitutional limits by treating the National Guard as its personal standing army,” said David Janovsky, acting director of The Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight. “First, it was Los Angeles. Then, it was our nation’s capital. Now, the federal government has its sights set on turning Chicago and Baltimore into police states. “This is an egregious and dangerous overreach that is already having disastrous consequences,” he claimed, and asked lawmakers to intervene. “Americans shouldn’t fear going to the grocery store or dropping their children off at school just because the administration wants to exert power and use our service members as political props,” he added.
For some informed legal analysis of a possible Guard deployment to Chicago, national security law professor Steve Vladeck wrote a quick explainer Tuesday following Pritzker and Trump’s remarks to reporters.
An excerpt: “[W]e’ve never had a President who thought it was a good idea to try to pull a stunt like this (or, at the very least, who didn’t face insurmountable political obstacles to attempting to do so),” Vladeck observes. “But my own view, having spent a lot of time looking at Founding-era materials on domestic uses of the military, is that a Constitution that authorized what Trump is apparently contemplating would never have been ratified by states that were already suspicious of giving away too much control over their own affairs.”
Related reading: “Can Federal Troops Be Stationed At The Polls In 2026?” former Justice Department attorney Joyce Vance considered, writing Tuesday on Substack.
New: Space Command HQ will move to Alabama, in part because of Colorado’s voting policies, Trump says. In the latest whiplash for the combatant command, the president says he will move SPACECOM headquarters to Huntsville, Alabama, reversing a Biden-administration decision to keep it at Peterson Air Force Base. The Pentagon spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build the Peterson HQ, which became fully operational less than two years ago.
Trump has long railed against mail-in voting, claiming falsely that it is more prone to fraud. (“Mail voting malfeasance is exceptionally rare,” says the nonpartisan Brennan Center.) Defense One’s Audrey Decker has more, here.
Additional reading: “Trump’s move of SPACECOM to Alabama has little to do with national security,” via ArsTechnica.
Europe
Ukraine’s milestone shows drones prevent defeat, but don’t secure victory. Kyiv’s announcement that it will procure two million drones this year underscores a counterintuitive phenomenon: increasing the speed of innovation and deployment of new technologies may not result in any increase in battlefield gains.
“Those one-way attack drones are not going to gain air superiority, and they don’t have air superiority, and that’s really one of the key attributes of the conflict in Russia-Ukraine, is no one does,” Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, commander of U.S. European Command, and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, said last week at an NDIA event in Washington, D.C.
Ukraine’s radical rethinking of acquisition now allows frontline commanders to buy drones directly from manufacturers—and receive them in as little as five days. The Pentagon is following suit, in spirit if not in letter. But will it work? Defense One’s Patrick Tucker digs in, here.
Related: “Ukrainian drone strikes strangle Putin’s fuel supplies,” reports Politico, adding that attacks on refineries have caused shortages and interrupted gas exports that are key to Moscow’s ability to continue its war.
How China is secretly arming Russia. An investigation by The Telegraph has unearthed 97 suppliers in ostensibly neutral China that are sending arms and components to Russia. “Goods directly exported by China to Russia included aircraft engines, microchips, metal alloys, camera lenses, fibreglass, emulsion binders for fibreglass, and carbon fibre yarns—all key components to produce the drones that wreak nightly havoc on Ukraine.” Read on, here.
Additional reading:
Etc.
Developing: There’s lots of new construction around a suspected nuclear weapons site inside Israel, AP reported Wednesday citing satellite imagery over the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center near the city of Dimona.
Experts who reviewed the imagery said “it could be a new reactor or a facility to assemble nuclear arms—but secrecy shrouding the program makes it difficult to know for sure.” Three said the location and size of the area under construction” pointed to “the construction of a new heavy water reactor.” Four others “acknowledged it could be a heavy water reactor but also suggested the work could be related to a new facility for assembling nuclear weapons.” Read more, here.
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