President Donald Trump maintained in conversations with reporters Wednesday that Tuesday’s deadly strike on a small Venezuelan boat carrying 11 alleged drug traffickers was warranted and should serve as a warning to anyone trying to smuggle drugs into the country.
“We have to protect our country, and we’re going to,” Trump said during an Oval Office visit with Polish President Karol Nawrocki. “Venezuela has been a very bad actor.”
Trump posted video footage of the attack to his Truth Social account on Tuesday, saying those on the boat were confirmed members of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua who were bringing drugs to the U.S. The federal government designated the gang as a foreign terrorist organization in February.
“The strike occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States. The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action,” Trump wrote. “Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE!”
The strike follows the reported movement of multiple American missile-destroying warships close to Venezuelan waters, after Trump issued orders to the Pentagon to “begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels,” according to reporting from The New York Times.
When asked why the military attacked the alleged drug vessel instead of intercepting it and arresting those on board, Trump said the U.S. wasn’t going to tolerate drug trafficking and other nefarious activity from Venezuela anymore.
“On the boat, you had massive amounts of drugs. We have tapes of them speaking. It was massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people,” the president said.
As he has done on multiple occasions, Trump said Venezuela “emptied out” its prisons into the U.S. under the border policies of the Biden administration, in addition to its drug smuggling operations.
“Think of it – opened up prisons, drug dealers, drug lords, everything coming out of Venezuela, they said. And we said we’re not going to put up with it anymore,” he said.
Venezuela is one of a few countries that doesn’t share its criminal records with the U.S. The president has said that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro released many of his country’s violent criminals to come to the U.S. in recent years.
The president has also said that Maduro has weaponized Tren de Aragua against the U.S. and is behind its “predatory incursion” into the U.S.
