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A recently released clip of a U.S. military strike shows a long-range strike obliterating a multi-engine speedboat in the Caribbean, an operation the President said killed 11 members of the Tren de Aragua criminal network. This was not a random act of violence; the administration has framed it as a targeted, lawful response to narco-terrorists who traffic lethal drugs toward our shores.
President Trump himself posted the short, labeled “UNCLASSIFIED,” footage on his social platform and warned that the U.S. is now hunting those who ship poison to American communities. The video is blunt evidence of American resolve — a message the smugglers and the regimes that profit from them should understand without ambiguity.
The White House has pointed to the Tren de Aragua as a designated foreign terrorist organization and tied the cartel’s operations to Venezuela’s corrupt regime, arguing that weak neighbors and hostile governments create safe havens for cartels. Whether critics like it or not, treating transnational drug cartels as security threats allows commanders to use real tools to stop the flow of fentanyl and cartel violence.
This action was not an isolated announcement — the President followed up by confirming a second strike weeks later that his team said killed three more suspected traffickers at sea. That continuation shows a pattern: deterrence backed by action, not endless hearings and press conferences from the same people who asked for soft borders and weak enforcement.
Of course, the usual chorus in the establishment press and in some congressional corners is howled as outrage, invoking legalities and moral posturing. Washington Post and other outlets have raised questions about the operation’s legality and demanded transparency, which is a reasonable ask — but transparency should not become an invisibility cloak for criminals who flood our cities with fentanyl.
Make no mistake: the administration has presented a simple rationale — drugs killed tens of thousands of Americans and allowed cartel terror to metastasize, and when other nations won’t or can’t act, the United States must defend its people. That argument resonates because voters have watched their families destroyed by addiction while politicians on the left campaigned for open borders and soft enforcement.
Still, conservatives should insist on clear rules of engagement, rigorous oversight, and real evidence when lethal force is used so that our troops and commanders are not trapped by politicized second-guessing. We can demand both toughness and accountability at the same time — defend the homeland, and then show the American people the proof that these strikes are surgical, necessary, and proportional.
These strikes are a wake-up call to regimes that shelter traffickers and to any political class that prefers virtue signaling to victory. Support the men and women in uniform who carry out hard missions, demand Congress provide the legal backing to finish the job, and don’t let the anti-law-and-order elites get away with pretending weakness is a moral posture.
