America Is Blowing Up Boats and Asking Questions Later

Opinion|America Is Blowing Up Boats and Asking Questions Later

Somewhere mingled in the foam and debris of the Caribbean Sea are the remains of at least 17 people who were killed this month by U.S. military forces on the orders of President Trump. They were aboard three speedboats that the Trump administration said were carrying drugs and smugglers from Venezuela.

Perhaps they were. Yet the administration has produced no evidence for its claims. And even if the allegations are correct, blowing up the boats is a lawless exercise in the use of deadly force.

On social media, Mr. Trump assured the public that the passengers were not only drug traffickers but also “narcoterrorists” and members of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang, which he said was under the control of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. Military force was justified as a form of self-defense, he said, because the cartels are “threatening our national security,” and his top aides have vowed to continue the strikes. The self-defense justification looks especially weak after The Times reported that the first of the three boats turned away from the United States before being destroyed.

With these attacks, Mr. Trump has ordered the summary execution of people who are not at war with the United States in any traditional sense of the term and who may not even have been committing the crime of which he accused them. It is a violation of legal due process that should alarm all Americans. It is even more extreme than his policy of sending migrants to a brutal prison in El Salvador, based on questionable claims that they belonged to Tren de Aragua and without any chance to contest the government’s claims. The United States, created in opposition to monarchy, should never become a country where the president can order the indefinite imprisonment or the unilateral killing of people merely because he has deemed them to be criminals.

Drug trafficking is a serious problem, with synthetic opioids such as fentanyl having killed more than 800,000 Americans in the 21st century. It would certainly be reasonable for the Trump administration to increase enforcement in waters around the United States, as it is has at the border. But there are legal ways to do so that stop far short of killing people based on suspicions, never publicly justified, that their boats are carrying drugs.

Until the past few weeks, the standard practice in these cases was for the Coast Guard to interdict the boats, seize the drugs, arrest the crew members and prosecute them. They then have a chance to defend themselves before possibly being convicted and subject to punishment. Federal law, first passed in 1949 and updated many times since, holds that only the Coast Guard — and not the Navy, the special forces or any other military branch — has the right to conduct law-enforcement operations on the high seas. (The Navy often supports the Coast Guard in these efforts.)