Drug Enforcement and the Venezuelan Power Grab

A grainy grey and white video depicting a boat as it is struck by a missile fills a small, rectangular phone screen, one of the first graphic visuals of its kind posted by the Trump administration. Upon the next swipe, another stark image fills the screen: a blindfolded Nicolás Maduro, detained by American officials and aboard a plane bound for New York, where he faces federal charges after his capture in early January. While both scenes are merely short, two-dimensional videos, they illustrate the beginning of a broader, graver issue: the disregard for due process employed by the Trump administration.

The Trump administration has organized 22 boat strikes and killed 83 people across the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean since September 2. These boat strikes have been carried out under the guise of eliminating drug smuggling to the United States (U.S.), but the lack of care for legal proceedings has demonstrated the administration’s true intentions. Its goal is not the preservation of international law and peace, but to continue conducting illegal actions while preaching of saving Americans from the opioid crisis. The administration is using these strikes as a starting point to escalate force on South and Central America.

The boat strikes have violated both international and national law in countless ways, showing the administration’s lack of care for truly, legally targeting crime. According to the Trump administration, the attacked boats were thought to have transported illegal substances. However, the people killed in these boat strikes were not provided due process and actions taken against them didn’t follow the typical Coast Guard step-by-step procedure. Lethal force has never been the primary resort in all previous interdictions by the Coast Guard, yet videos of the strikes have demonstrated initial, escalatory uses of often unwarranted violence. 

Additionally, the boat strikes are unlawful in that they do not adhere to the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which states that the president must consult Congress before deploying armed forces. Even in emergency situations, the administration must report to Congress within 48 hours and cease all hostilities within 60 days if approval is not granted, yet it has been over 60 days and strikes have continued. Moreover, further information about the boat strikes reveals additional violations of international law: two survivors of the initial missile blast were ordered to be killed by a second strike while clinging to wreckage. The continued attacks violate Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which states that those wounded by conflict should be treated humanely, with their being targeted constituting a war crime. In addition, the United States’ Department of War’s Law of War Manual clearly prohibits the use of force “on the basis that there shall be no survivors.”

Beyond ignoring legal procedures, the administration has normalized this behavior by expressing that the War Powers Resolution should be disregarded altogether. In a recent White House press briefing, Vice President JD Vance said “every president, Democrat or Republican, believes the War Powers Act is fundamentally a fake and unconstitutional law.” This implies that the president has leeway to pick and choose which laws to follow directly defies the Constitution, which is meant to uniformly apply to the executive branch of the government. This disregard is what paved the way for Maduro’s capture and the exertion of control over Venezuela following his removal from office; by ignoring national and international laws without any severe consequences from Congress, Trump has successfully allowed himself to pick and choose which laws his administration follows.

In Trump’s attempts to rally supporters, his justification for illegal, escalatory action has been framed as a war on drugs, despite the lack of evidence that Venezuela is substantially involved in drug production. Due to the over 510,000 pounds of cocaine seized by the United States Coast Guard this year, on January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order designating six drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Cartels, Trump claims, are terrorist organizations because they pose an immediate threat to American lives through the large numbers of opioid deaths in America—54,743 just last year, to be exact. The Trump administration has referenced the opioid crisis as an immediate threat and attack on the people of America, using this designation to justify Trump’s actions. However, they do not qualify as such because there is no immediate, physical threat of an armed attack. In fact, despite Trump’s persistent claims that Venezuela is a major producer of drugs, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment determined that 84 percent of seized cocaine in 2024 was determined to be of Colombian origin. For fentanyl, which also has one of the largest drug markets in the U.S., the DEA asserts that the main flow comes from Mexico, not Venezuela. While the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean have verifiably been used to transport illegal drugs such as fentanyl and cocaine into the United States and should be responded to as such, the Trump administration’s use of illegal, unauthorized, and lethal force is clearly not directed toward solving a Venezuelan-caused opioid crisis, but rather furthering geopolitical and economic control over Venezuela.

By selectively following the law in his illegal boat strikes, Trump perfectly laid the steps for himself to wield power in the internal affairs of Venezuela. Now, he has done just this. In a mostly unprecedented move, the U.S. took hold of Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026, following several strikes on the city of Caracas. These attacks have been key components of the larger campaign by the administration to assert control over various Central and South American countries, especially Venezuela, where abundant oil reserves have become a key U.S. interest. Although Maduro has been accused of fraud and being an authoritarian leader, the removal of Venezuela’s head of state was illegal and motivated by the United States’s own ambitions rather than the well-being of Venezuelan and American citizens. Venezuela, which currently sits on the largest supply of crude oil in the world—300 million confirmed barrels, to be specific—is of large interest to the United States. By capturing Maduro, the U.S. acted upon these interests, using boat strikes simply as a first step in asserting full control over Venezuela and its natural resources. Venezuelan oil will not only provide billions of dollars for the United States, but also help assert the United States’ influence over Latin America. 

The hidden long-term purpose and illegal nature of the actions in Venezuela sets a dangerous precedent for the future of checks and balances on the president’s war powers and should raise serious concern to all citizens about the future of our country. Each branch of the United States government must retain its ability to check the powers of the others in order to prevent the creation of an authoritarian state where the executive branch retains complete control. By abusing war powers and disregarding Congress, the president has unjustly increased the power of the executive branch of the United States and killed that of the legislative branch. Furthermore, the outcomes in Venezuela have made it abundantly clear that while Trump’s almost daily violations of constitutional law have begun to be accepted by the world as typical, it is crucial to fight back. The administration has used boat strikes and illegal actions as an entryway into taking over Venezuela, and will continue this strategy of pushing boundaries over time to achieve complete control. The lives of people cannot be determined without due process, nor is it acceptable to reduce lethal force to a small decision with no weight. In a constitutional system, the law is not merely a technicality; it is a barrier that prevents power from becoming unchecked. Without a greater awareness of the illegality of these events, a precedent is set for further unchecked violations that will disintegrate the foundations of law upon which our country resides.