Illegal and immoral, Trump ordered killings of alleged drug smugglers at sea come with a cost to America’s soul | Editorial

From the start, the Trump administration’s boat strikes on alleged drug smugglers have been deemed illegal. But new evidence shows they are also costly and ineffective.

For nine months, the U.S. military has used fighter jets and missiles to destroy small boats in the waters off South America to supposedly stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States.

But the bombing campaign has been a failure on many fronts. The cocaine keeps coming and the tax dollars keep going.

It is just as easy to get drugs today as it was before the operation began, according to public health researchers and addiction specialists.

At the same time, a recent analysis by Brown University found just the cost of the munitions in the boat strikes topped $50 million — though the full cost to taxpayers is much higher.

Not to mention, the human cost: More than 200 people have been summarily executed under the Trump administration’s policy of shoot first and answer no legal questions.

But President Donald Trump and his supremely unfit Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would rather celebrate the killings than answer hard questions.

Lost in the revelry and abuse of power has been any due process for those slain — as required by the Fifth and 14th amendments in the Constitution.

No charges have been filed. No evidence has been presented to even demonstrate the boats were transporting illegal drugs to the United States.

The family of Alejandro Carranza Medina, a 42-year-old Colombian man killed in a boat strike, said he was a lifelong fisherman with no ties to the drug trade who was trolling for marlin and tuna. They filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights seeking compensation and an end to the attacks.

“The U.S. has really gone off the rails in terms of these killings,” said Dan Kovalik, a human rights attorney representing Medina’s family. “It has really destroyed its status in the world.”

The families of two Trinidadian men killed in U.S. boat strikes in October filed wrongful death lawsuits in federal court, accusing the government of extrajudicial killings in violation of the Death on the High Seas Act and the Alien Tort Statute.

More appalling, after two other men survived a boat strike, orders were given to go back and kill them — which may be a war crime.

Representatives from the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the International Crisis Group and the United Nations argued at a hearing in March that the lethal strikes violated U.S. and international law.

The Trump administration is “responding with lawless violence that flagrantly violates human rights, in its phony war on so-called narco-terrorism,” said Ben Saul, the U.S. special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, who detailed the many wrongs of the United States.

Jamil Dakwar, the director of the ACLU Human Rights Program, was blunter: “These are premeditated and intentional extrajudicial killings that lack any plausible legal justification.” He added, “they were simply murders, ordered by individuals at the highest level of government.”

Donald Trump claims those aboard the boats are “narco-terrorists” who are “affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization.”

But the administration has produced no evidence to back that claim or support Trump’s false assertion that each boat strike saves 25,000 American lives.

Trump’s Justice Department prepared a memo to justify the boat strikes, but the contents remain secret. The memo reportedly relies on Trump’s invented claim the U.S. is engaged in armed conflict with drug cartels.

However, under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war. Congress has not authorized any armed conflict regarding the boat strikes, the invasion and arrest of Venezuela’s president or the war in Iran.

In October, the Senate introduced a War Powers resolution aimed at stopping the boat strikes, but the measure narrowly failed to pass.

Amid the lawlessness, killings and financial cost of the boat strikes, something bigger has been lost. Under Trump, America has ceded its moral authority.

How can the U.S. claim to lead the free world when it bombs multiple countries, kidnaps the head of a sovereign nation, bully’s allies, befriends authoritarians, kills its own citizen, deports migrants without due process, and attacks the rule of law?

The country that once welcomed the tired, the poor and the huddled masses is now kicking them out — while bombing boats in international waters.

This is a painful and sad admission, but it must be said: Trump has transformed the United States from a global protector to a global predator.