The “targeted killing” of alleged drug smugglers in a speedboat in the south Caribbean shows a disregard for international law but one that did not start with the Trump administration, said Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of law and International Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame.

“President Trump has a particular rhetorical flourish with everything he does, and that draws more attention to the severity of [his] violations, but I’ve been a longtime critic of targeted killing of terrorism suspects,” she said in an interview with America, explaining that Mr. Trump has only pushed the envelope on a dubious practice that has been put to use by White House residents since the Clinton administration.

The notion of targeted killings “was never lawful,” Dr. O’Connell said, even when it was aimed exclusively at terrorism suspects, and it is thoroughly unlawful “when it’s aimed at drug trafficking suspects.” She worries that the president, in attempting to thwart criminal acts, may be committing them himself.

A justified use of force?

In recent days the White House narrative around the operation and its rationale for the strike have grown increasingly murky. A spokesperson for the State Department declined to comment on the issues of legal justification for the use of force or its authorization by Congress but emailed links to statements on the attack from Mr. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

In those statements the president made no effort to legally ground his decision to order the strike that, he said, claimed 11 lives.

Political leaders who wish to ensure that acts meant to defend law and order rise above criminality must “carefully and stringently abide by the applicable law in suppressing crime,” Dr. O’Connell said. The missile strike suggests that the president believes military force can legitimately be part of what has normally been an accepted law enforcement operation, a perilous blending of power and enforcement responsibilities that she calls “extreme.”

Cartel members and drug traffickers, as odious as their trade may be, have traditionally been treated as criminals with due process rights—not terrorists or enemy combatants. Traffickers attempting to reach the United States are regularly intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard, which for many years has boarded and secured such vessels without resorting to lethal force.

But at a press briefing on Sept. 2, Mr. Rubio noted that Mr. Trump has designated drug cartels “terrorist organizations.” He told reporters: “The president has been very clear that he is going to use…the full might of the United States to take on and eradicate these drug cartels no matter where they’re operating from and no matter how long they have been able to act with impunity. Those days are over.”

Speaking to reporters in Mexico City the next day, the secretary justified a more aggressive U.S. stance, arguing that “interdiction doesn’t work because these drug cartels—what they do is they know they’re going to lose 2 percent of their cargo. They bake it into their economics.”

“What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them…instead of interdicting [the vessel]. On the president’s orders, he blew it up. And it’ll happen again…. The president of the United States is going to wage war on narcoterrorist organizations.”

On the academic website The Conversation, Dr. O’Connell wrote that the attack violated, among other treaties and conventions, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Article 6 of the covenant holds: “Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.”

And under Catholic moral teaching, there is no justification for the use of deadly force in this instance, she said in an email to America, since the individuals on the boat were not involved in armed conflict, nor were they felons in flight known to pose a risk of violence to bystanders. Secretary Rubio said they could have been intercepted using law enforcement methods, but “the president simply chose to kill them to send a message.”

“Catholics believe in respecting life from conception to natural death,” Dr. O’Connell wrote. “We never support the death penalty even after a fair trial, let alone summary execution after no trial.”

The demonstration effect

The Navy strike raises stark questions about how far Mr. Trump may wield U.S. military power without a robust check on the executive branch from Congress. Since his inauguration, Mr. Trump dropped 30,000-pound bombs on Iranian nuclear sites without a new War Powers authorization from Congress. He deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles over the objections of California’s Democratic governor and says he plans to send the National Guard into other cities. The administration also recently rebranded the Department of Defense as the Department of War even though it is not clear that the executive office has the power to do so without congressional approval.

“I don’t care whether it’s a Republican president or a Democrat president,” Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said. “We can’t just want to kill people without having some kind of process.”

“We’re just going to blow up ships? That just isn’t who we are,” Mr. Paul said.

Beyond the potential misuse of military power, Dr. O’Connell worries about the “demonstration effect” of the administration’s liquidation of the alleged traffickers, a trickle-down impression of the president’s indifference to constitutional war powers boundaries and justification for the use of force that may embolden others in law enforcement—for example, federal agents running immigration raids—to show a similar disregard for legal constraints.

That demonstration effect is not limited to actors in the United States. She points out that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed no concern about how the Israeli targeted strike on Hamas negotiators who were staying in Doha, Qatar, might violate international law. She adds that other powerful leaders like China’s President Xi Jinping are carefully tracking the apparent disregard for international law and rules of engagement shown by the Trump administration.

How might the White House react if China, which has dispatched naval vessels to Latin American waters, launched such a strike, she asked.

“If President Xi made up some facts about people on a boat in the Caribbean and shot a missile…and killed 11 people,” Dr. O’Connell said, “I hope President Trump would immediately say, ‘You have violated international law, the law against the use of force and human rights law.’” But having violated those laws now himself, she wonders if Mr. Trump be in a position to criticize an extravagant use of force by another world leader.

The demonstration effect can also work positively, Dr. O’Connell added. “The social science research that I’ve been doing on how you regain and rebuild [international law] principles,” she said, “really shows that when a leading state models law compliance, you get these beneficial impacts. You get others measuring themselves against them.”

And “if the U.S. wants good economic relations and trade agreements, if it wants an end to trafficking and other problems, we have to model compliance with the law that works,” Dr. O’Connell added. “That’s maybe another of the tragic ironies of this killing on the Caribbean. We have a whole series of bilateral treaties [on drug trafficking] that work really well.”

The strike against the drug traffickers maintains the high state of chaos and uncertainty that swirls around the president’s decision making, his constitutional boundary testing and the administration’s probing of the limits of international humanitarian law, Dr. O’Connell said. It “accelerated the entire chaotic situation we seem to be hurtling into.”

Dr. O’Connell worries that American prestige is suffering around the world as a result. “We invented democracy,” she said, “we invented the rule of law as being the core ordering principle of people’s society together.” But now, around the world, “we’re considered a declining democracy.”

With reporting from The Associated Press.

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This article appears in November 2025.

Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).