Trump threatens to ‘take out the cartels’ amid escalating war on drugs

President Donald Trump launched an unprecedented war against cartels and threatened narcoterrorists, saying he would “make you disappear” as his administration sought to curb the flow of drugs into the United States.

The White House sent lawmakers a memo on September 30 informing them that the United States is now engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug traffickers – in addition to having carried out four deadly strikes against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean since September.

The War Department recently announced the creation of a new joint counternarcotics task force in the Southern Command area of ​​responsibility, according to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

The task force’s goal is to “crush the cartels, stop the poison, and keep America safe.” Hegseth wrote on Friday X. “The message is clear: if you smuggle drugs to our shores, we will stop you in your tracks.”

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These recent developments suggest that Trump is targeting targets in Venezuela, and not just in international waters, according to Geoff Ramsey, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council international affairs think tank.

“This is a sign that President Trump is taking America’s war on drugs in Latin America to the next level,” Ramsey said in an email to Fox News Digital on Monday. “By involving the military, the president is taking on drug cartels in a way that no previous U.S. administration has dared to do so far. I think it is likely that we will see the Pentagon evaluate its targets inside Venezuela.”

President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he had ordered a deadly strike against a vessel linked to a designated terrorist organization operating in the United States Southern Command area of ​​responsibility on September 19, 2025. (@realDonaldTrump via Truth Social)

Additional strikes could target more drug deliveries or flights, which often take off from secret airfields near the Colombian border, Ramsey said.

“It’s a bad time to be assigned to a guerrilla camp on the Colombian border or to run a Tren de Aragua shelter along the Caribbean trafficking route,” Ramsey said.

Nevertheless, Ramsey said it would be difficult to strike on Venezuelan territory. This would require the United States to dismantle Venezuela’s air defense system, leading to an escalation of hostilities by openly engaging with the Venezuelan military, he said.

This is a departure from the current approach, in which the United States has intentionally avoided targeting Venezuelan military assets, Ramsey said.

“When two Venezuelan F-16s flew over a U.S. destroyer last month, the fact that those planes were not destroyed from the sky suggests that the United States is not interested in a war with the Venezuelan military,” Ramsey said.

Trump himself has not ruled out carrying out strikes in Venezuela, and signaled that such strikes could occur when he told military leaders in Quantico, Virginia, on September 30 that his administration would “take a very serious look at cartels coming by land.”

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President Donald Trump addresses a gathering of top U.S. military commanders at Marine Corps Base Quantico, September 30, 2025, in Quantico, Virginia. (Evan Vucci/Associated Press)

So far, the Trump administration has used maritime forces to deal with drug threats and has been boosting its naval assets in the Caribbean in recent months. For example, Trump approved sending several U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyers to bolster the administration’s counternarcotics efforts in the region starting in August.

“I expect these deployments to continue for months, if not more than a year, with new ships arriving to replace those that need to return home for maintenance or crew rest,” Bryan Clark, director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute think tank, told Fox News Digital in September.

Nathan Jones, a nonresident drug policy researcher studying in Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, predicted the strikes would likely not impact the flow of fentanyl into the United States. This is because fentanyl precursors come from China and are then produced in laboratories in Mexico before being headed north without passing through the Caribbean.

“I wouldn’t expect your drug flow to be affected because of these strikes,” Jones told Fox News Digital on Tuesday. “It might, however, leave transnational criminal organizations a little scared about what the administration is going to do.”

Jones said, however, that he anticipated that drug routes would adapt and that land or air drug routes would take precedence over maritime routes in the Caribbean.

The strikes have prompted members of Congress to question their legality, and Senators Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, and Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, introduced a war powers resolution in September that would prevent U.S. forces from engaging in “hostilities” against certain nonstate organizations.

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Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, speaks during a news conference in April 2025 in Washington. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

“Congress did not authorize the use of force in this manner,” Schiff told reporters Wednesday. “I think it’s clearly unconstitutional. The fact that the administration claims to have a list and has put organizations on a list does not give the administration the authority to usurp the power of Congress to declare war or refuse to declare war or refuse to authorize the use of force.”

However, the measure failed in the Senate on Wednesday by a margin of 51 to 48. Even so, the measure attracted support from Republicans Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who voted alongside their Democratic counterparts for the resolution.

Other Republicans, however, defended the strikes, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Jim Risch, Republican of Idaho, said Trump’s actions were well within his rights and the resolution was “unreasonable.”

“When he sees an attack like this coming — an attack with drugs or explosives or anything else that’s going to kill Americans — he not only has the authority to do something, he has a duty to do something,” Risch said Wednesday before the vote.