Trump insists he can strike alleged drug traffickers abroad without congress declaring War
US President Donald Trump said on Friday, October 24, that he believes he can continue ordering strikes against suspected drug traffickers overseas without first seeking a formal declaration of war from Congress.
“I’m not going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war,” he said. “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay? We’re going to kill them, you know, they’re going to be like, dead.”
Trump suggested his administration would target individuals he labels cartel members in countries such as Venezuela and would continue striking alleged drug-smuggling boats on the high seas. He added he would notify Congress before any operations conducted on “land,” but insisted he did not expect significant pushback from lawmakers.
“We going to go. I don’t see any loss in going” to Congress, Trump said. “We’re going to tell them what we’re going to do and I think they’ll probably like it, except for the radical left lunatics.”
The lethal strikes on vessels in the Caribbean and east Pacific have unnerved some lawmakers, given the little evidence the administration has presented proving that the targets were so-called narco-terrorists.
On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted that the military has confirmed that each targeted boat is trafficking drugs. He defended the decision to return two survivors of a recent strike as “standard” practice in war. He stated that in past conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan, the vast majority of people captured were handed over to their home country. “So in this case, those two, they were treated by American medics and handed immediately over to their countries where they came from.”
Trump’s remarks came as an American B-1 Lancer bomber flew near the coast of Venezuela on Thursday, although the president denied that the U.S. sent the bomber.
“No, it’s not accurate. No. It’s false. But we’re not happy with Venezuela for a lot of reasons. Drugs being one of them, but also they’ve been sending their prisoners into our country for years under the Biden administration, not anymore, we have a closed border,” Trump said.
The aircraft first appeared on flight-tracking dashboards southwest of the Dallas Fort Worth area around 4:30 a.m. ET on Thursday. At its closest point, it was a little more than 50 miles from the Venezuelan mainland. Open-source flight data later showed the bomber reappearing for around 15 minutes within Venezuela’s flight information region (FIR), although it was not immediately clear whether the plane entered Venezuelan airspace.
The flight occurs as tensions continue to rise between the two countries following the deployment of U.S. warships to the Caribbean as part of what Washington calls a counter-drug trafficking campaign. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Wednesday claimed his country had 5,000 Russian-made Igla-S anti-aircraft missiles in “key air defense positions,” systems capable of shooting down small aerial targets like low-flying planes.
