WASHINGTON — Legal experts are casting doubt on President Donald Trump’s justification for the deadly strike this week on a boat carrying drugs in the Caribbean, saying it carries a dangerous precedent when it comes to the use of executive power.

“The president doesn’t just get to say we’re at war,” said professor Rachel E. VanLandingham of Southwestern Law School, a retired Air Force judge who is an expert in military law. “This was intentional killing, and I’ve seen zero lawful basis for this.”

The White House argued the strike falls under the law of “armed conflict” but has not given the specific legal authority it used to carry out the attack.

Trump claimed the vessel carried suspected Tren de Aragua drug smugglers who were bringing a massive shipment of cocaine from Venezuela to American shores aboard a vessel that had departed from Venezuela. He shared video of the strike on social media.

In February, the administration designated Tren de Aragua, the Sinaloa Cartel, MS-13 and other drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. And officials have long blamed Venezuela and its leader Nicolás Maduro for heavy cocaine trafficking to the United States, leading to American deaths from drug use.

The Trump administration has put a $50 million bounty on Maduro’s head for his arrest.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last month that designation gave the administration “legal authorities to target them in ways you can’t do if they’re just a bunch of criminals.”

The White House echoed that argument in regards to this week’s strike.

The strike “was taken in defense of vital U.S. national interests and in the collective self-defense of other nations who have long suffered due to the narcotics trafficking and violent cartel activities of such organizations. The strike was fully consistent with the law of armed conflict,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement.

But designating a group a foreign terrorist organization may not be enough to justify an armed military strike. Trump said 11 “terrorists” were killed in the bombing.

The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force gave then-President George W. Bush the authority to go after groups that aided the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks or to “prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

Drug cartels would not be tied to the 9/11 terrorists.

And there was no indication of an imminent threat to the United States, which would have been another justification for the attack.

Additionally, the president’s war powers, as outlined in the Constitution, are usually limited to events where groups have done harm to the United States or its citizens. And, under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war.

Also, Title 50 — which is part of the War Powers Act — does not appear to apply. That provision allows a president to take covert actions as long as Congress is informed. But posting the video of the strike on social media negates the covert aspect.

And international law, which allows a country to defend its borders, is not applicable.

“The Coast Guard and the Navy do defensive stuff near our shoreline all the time,” said Eric Carpenter, a law professor at Florida International University who’s an expert on military issues. “You can intercept boats that are coming towards the coast. We shoot at boats all the time.”

“That’s all perfectly fine,” he added, “but this was so far removed from that, that it’s just not plausible to say that that was a defensive action under international law.”

Former Department of Defense officials also had their doubts.

“I worked at DoD. I literally cannot imagine lawyers coming up with a legal basis for lethal strike of suspected Venezuelan drug boat,” retired law professor Ryan Goodman wrote on social media. “Hard to see how this would not be ‘murder’ or war crime under international law that DoD considers applicable.”

Additionally, the administration has not released any details about how it determined the vessel was owned by a Venezuelan gang. It has offered no proof that 11 people were killed, said how many people were on the vessel or released any names of the deceased.

International reaction to the attack has been muted, with only a few voices condemning the lethal strike.

Among them was Colombian President Gustavo Petro, a Venezuela ally and former guerrilla fighter who in August 2022 became the first leftist president of his country. Petro said the attack would amount to “a murder anywhere in the world.”

“Those who transport drugs are not the big traffickers, but the very poor young people of the Caribbean and the Pacific,” Petro wrote on his X account, stressing that Colombia has long dealt with low-level couriers through arrests rather than lethal force.

Also speaking out against the strike was Amnesty International, which in a message on X said it was “deeply alarmed by the attack.” The organization argued that the circumstances raise serious doubts about legality, accountability and compliance with international human rights law. If confirmed, the strike would constitute a clear violation of the right to life and set a dangerous precedent, it said.

“The United States must demonstrate, in every attack, that intentional lethal force was used only when it was strictly unavoidable to protect life; that less harmful means, such as capture or non-lethal incapacitation, were not possible; and that the use of force was proportionate to the prevailing circumstances,” said Daphne Eviatar, director of Security with Human Rights at Amnesty International USA.

Washington, however, sees the confrontation through a very different lens. For the Trump administration, the gang at the center of the incident — Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, or TDA — is no ordinary drug network. Once confined to prisons in Aragua state, TDA has evolved into a sprawling multinational syndicate with operations across Latin America and, according to U.S. law enforcement, footholds in several American cities. The FBI contends this expansion is no accident: senior Venezuelan officials are suspected of deliberately facilitating the migration of TDA members to undermine public safety in the United States.

A bureau memo released earlier this year describes TDA as both a criminal enterprise and a geopolitical tool. It alleges that since at least late 2023, the Maduro government has strategically managed and financed the group, using it to stoke social unrest in U.S. cities such as New York and Chicago as leverage in sanctions talks. That assessment bolsters Trump’s claim that TDA is not merely a gang but a foreign-backed security threat—a rationale he invoked when he used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify expedited deportations of Venezuelan nationals tied to the organization.

The FBI’s account diverges sharply from a more cautious April 2025 report by the National Intelligence Council, which concluded that while Venezuela’s permissive environment allows TDA to thrive, the regime probably does not exert direct control. Still, opposition figures like María Corina Machado insist that Maduro and powerful allies such as Diosdado Cabello have long orchestrated the gang’s rise.

Trump justified his decision by arguing the strike would act as a deterrent against such action happening again.

“There was massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people, and everybody fully understands that,” the president said Thursday at the White House.

“Obviously, they won’t be doing it again,” he added. And I think a lot of other people won’t be doing it again. When they watch that tape, they’re going to say, ‘Let’s not do this.’”

U.S. forces could have stopped and boarded the boat but Trump made the decision to bomb it, according to Rubio.

“Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up — and it’ll happen again,” Rubio told reporters Wednesday in Mexico City.

“The president of the United States is going to wage war on narco-terrorist organizations,” he said, adding that Trump has the right “to eliminate imminent threats to the United States.”

The Pentagon echoed the justification for the strikes. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the administration knew the identities of the people in the vessel.

“We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented. And that was Tren de Aragua narcoterrorist organization designated by the United States as trying to poison our country with illicit drugs,” he told Fox News.

The vessel was operating in international waters but that added to the murkiness of the legal justification.

“I think they think they can just get away with it and they’re gonna think most people don’t care,” VanLandingham, the Southwestern Law School professor, told McClatchy.

“But this has profound implications for the entire global world order, the legal order that’s been established since World War II to try to prevent the use of force. Another world war.”

She added that the strike was similar to the actions that dictators and authoritarian leaders take against perceived enemies.

“They use lethal force to kill people they don’t like outside of any kind of legal framework. And that’s exactly what happened. And that’s an incredibly dangerous precedent.”

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