U.S. President Donald Trump speaks, flanked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 26, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
On September 1 in the Caribbean, U.S. Navy forces attacked, on orders from President Donald Trump, a Venezuelan boat he alleges was operated by members of the dangerous Tren de Aragua gang and contained drugs that were headed for the United States. The boat was in international waters, and everyone on board was killed.
The Trump administration continues to aggressively defend that attack and subsequent attacks on boats carried out September 15-19.
But the New York Times' editorial board, in a scathing editorial published on September 24, stresses that Trump acted without concrete proof that people on those boats were smuggling drugs.
"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," the Times editorial board writes. "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."
Trump, the Times editorial board notes, "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."
"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," the board warns. "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 Times board continues, "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."