President Donald Trump said Tuesday that U.S. forces have carried out strikes on three Venezuelan vessels in recent weeks as part of an expanding campaign he described as aimed at "narco-terrorists." The announcement, made on the White House lawn before the president departed for the United Kingdom, came after Mr. Trump posted video on his Truth Social account showing a boat engulfed in flames following a military strike.
"We knocked off, actually three boats, not two, but you saw two," the president told reporters. He said the strikes targeted traffickers transporting illegal drugs in international waters bound for the United States and that those narcotics were a "deadly weapon" responsible for poisoning American citizens.
The White House video shows a small vessel at sea that is later seen burning. Mr. Trump said three narcotics traffickers were killed in the operation depicted in the video and has previously said a U.S. Navy strike in early September killed 11 people. A Department of Defense screengrab circulating publicly shows what officials described as a speedboat carrying members of the Venezuelan criminal group Tren de Aragua transporting illegal narcotics in international waters.
Administration officials have provided limited public details about the planning, legal justification and rules of engagement for the operations. The Intercept reported that the administration has restricted congressional oversight by barring senior House staffers from certain classified briefings about the strikes, a move that has left some lawmakers and staff unable to review classified materials or the underlying legal rationale.
Questions about the strikes have also centered on reported follow-up actions. Lawmakers and aides say some individuals who survived an initial hit were killed in a subsequent strike moments later; because of the new briefing restrictions, staff members said they have been unable to examine those accounts in classified settings to assess compliance with engagement protocols.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has warned his country that the United States may be preparing an invasion and urged citizens to prepare for a potential conflict. "If Venezuela were attacked by the American empire, we must activate the armed struggle of the Venezuelan people in a perfect popular-military-police fusion!" he said in comments reported by El País.
Asked to respond to Mr. Maduro's warning, Mr. Trump did not rule out the option of a direct confrontation but emphasized his demand that Venezuela crack down on drug flows. "Stop sending the Tren de Aragua to the United States. Stop sending drugs to the United States," the president said Tuesday. "Stop sending your people, your prisoners, to our country. They're sending their prisoners. They've already done it."
The developments came as FBI Director Kash Patel, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, characterized the trafficking operations as tantamount to the terrorist threats the United States confronted after Sept. 11. "We must treat them like foreign terrorist organizations post-9/11. We must treat them like the al-Qaidas of the world," he told senators, arguing for an interagency approach combining intelligence and military assets.
Mr. Patel said the government was applying a range of options used in counterterrorism missions — "whether that's in a kill operation, a capture operation, a surrender operation, or a host nation takedown" — to traffickers operating in Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia.
Administration officials have framed the strikes as part of a broader effort to disrupt drug-smuggling networks they say are responsible for a surge in overdose deaths in the United States; critics and some lawmakers have expressed concern about the transparency of the operations and the legal authorities under which U.S. forces are operating. Congressional staff members who sought to review classified briefings described by The Intercept said they were blocked from attending, limiting congressional oversight of the actions.
The sequence of public statements — the president's social-media posts and on-the-record comments, the Pentagon's distribution of operational footage, and testimony from the FBI director — has provided the most detailed public account to date of the U.S. campaign. But key legal and operational documents, including the specific rules of engagement and the legal basis for strikes in international waters, have not been publicly released.
The disclosures come amid rising tensions between Washington and Caracas, and at a time when U.S. officials have increasingly described transnational criminal organizations as national security threats. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill said they plan to question administration officials further and press for classified briefings, while the Biden-era precedent and international law experts have said such operations raise complex legal and diplomatic issues.
For now, U.S. officials characterize the strikes as targeted actions against traffickers on the high seas. Venezuela's government has decried the operations and framed them as aggression. The lack of full congressional access to classified material about the strikes and the administration's reliance on public statements and selectively released footage are likely to ensure the operations remain a subject of dispute in Washington and a flashpoint in U.S.-Venezuelan relations.