The recent massacre in the Caribbean was a step toward making America a police state under President-for-Life Trump

Eleven Dead on the High Seas. Trump Is Testing the Waters For Illegal Military Rule in America.

By Mitchell Zimmerman

Why is Donald Trump committing murder on the high seas?

Last week President Trump bragged that “On my Orders,” the Navy destroyed a speedboat with eleven people aboard, claiming that those slain were “Tren de Aragua Narco terrorists . . . transporting illegal narcotics, heading for the United States.”

The legal procedure for dealing with drug traffickers on the high seas is actually for the Navy or Coast Guard to stop and board the suspect vessel, confirm it is carrying illegal drugs, then arrest and prosecute those on board.

Instead, Trump treated what should have been an (alleged) criminal law enforcement matter as open warfare and, without any need, killed everyone aboard. 

Why? Because Trump wants the lethal use of military firepower on supposed foreign “bad guys” to serve as a model for militarizing American cities – in the name of stopping an imaginary crime wave.

One week after the Caribbean Sea attack, Trump and the Defense Department have yet to provide evidence the vessel was carrying drugs to America. But even if had been, summarily killing eleven civilians is still murder.

Calling a criminal gang a “foreign terrorist organization” does not make it legal to slay alleged gang members without a trial – particularly when the gang has not been linked to acts of political terrorism, as confirmed by the fact that the Justice Department’s two indictments of gang members include no charges of terrorism.

Senator Reed condemned the strike as a premeditated use
of lethal force carried out without congressional authorization,
clear legal justification, or evidence of an imminent threat

Still less does tagging them “Narco terrorists” mean that the United States is in “armed conflict” with a gang, to which the laws of war might apply. Gangs aren’t enemy nations and they’re not fighting for a political ideology – they’re in it for the money. Suppressing them isn’t warfare. The Navy was not engaged in a naval battle with a speedboat.

A former State Department attorney specializing in counterterrorism, Brian Finucane, put it succinctly. “Outside of armed conflict, we have a word for the premeditated killing of people. That word is murder.”

Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, confirmed the point. “Using lethal force in this way, outside of any recognizable armed conflict and without due process, is an extrajudicial execution, not an act of war.” Myriad legal experts confirm that obvious conclusion.

But Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to justify the slayings by asserting “interdiction doesn't work.” “What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth echoed the sentiment. “Anyone trafficking in those waters who we know is a deadly terrorist will face the same fate.”

But if our military is allowed to blow up people on unproven assertions of drug dealing, the same logic would justify the military engaging in summary executions of those they deem “bad guys” in the United States itself. Which is perhaps the point.

Drug trafficking is not a capital offense in the United States. The alleged crimes would not warrant execution even if Trump’s targets were found to be cartel drug smugglers..

In reality, there is little reason to credit Trump’s claims about who the people on board were and what they were doing.

·     The U.S. Department of Justice brought two indictments against the Tren de Aragua gang this year, in April and August. Neither indictment alleges the gang brings drugs from Venezuela to the United States.

·     The indictments actually suggest more disturbing possibilities: that most of those Trump ordered killed were victims of sex trafficking. The April indictment charged Tren de Aragua with “forcing young women trafficked from Venezuela into commercial sex work.”

·     A former senior federal law enforcement official suggested that the vessel was on a human smuggling run, carrying refugees seeking to flee Venezuela.

Nonetheless, Trump prefers the drug smuggling story because it is part of his strategy to conflate immigration, crime and gangs to justify sending troops into American cities.

Trump’s claim that undocumented immigrants have brought rampant crime to America is false. Few of those Trump is deporting have committed a serious crime, and immigrants as a group are actually less likely to commit crimes than native born Americans. But Trump has repeated his phony charge hundreds of times, and it has had an impact.

Drug-running gangs enjoy little sympathy, and Trump expects few people to worry about whether the eleven individuals he ordered killed were drug traffickers or actually the gang’s victims. But if he gets away with having the Navy blow them up, he hopes Americans will come to see troops on our streets as acceptable, even desirable, since they are (purportedly) fighting the same drug dealing villains.

Trump himself drew the direct connection between his war powers as commander in chief and his claim that military force is the solution to crime in the U.S. when he recently threatened, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

He will not immediately order unrestrained violence against alleged criminals (or opponents) as freely as he did in the Caribbean Sea off Venezuela. But he has begun the process of legitimizing law-free military “law enforcement,” first abroad and eventually in America.

Where will it end?

Trump has declared emergency after emergency, many of them focusing on his deportation agenda, and all of them stretching – and breaching – the lawful limits of presidential power. Trump has correctly concluded that if he is to swiftly deport millions of immigrants without considering their possible right to be here, his targets must be deprived of the due process of law which our Constitution guarantees to everyone in America.

But eliminating due process rights does not enjoy broad popular support, and Trump’s deportation efforts have repeatedly been stymied by the courts. Enter the concocted “Narco terrorist” boat incident. In Trump’s narrative – never mind truth or evidence – the U.S. Navy eliminates “bad guys” on the high seas without bothersome legal process.

It’s political theater. But not just theater.

The legal theories are those Trump’s Justice Department has asserted with little success in federal court: First, that Trump is entitled to use the military for “law enforcement” because we are being “invaded.” Second, that alleged gang members can be summarily deported and imprisoned (and now killed) because we are “at war” with cartels. Trump may not be able to persuade the courts that these outlandish legal theories are correct, but he can act on them with impunity in the waters off Venezuela, by ordering the Navy to dole out death.

Trump’s ultimate end is plain enough: unlimited power.

Donald Trump was the only president in the life of the Republic to refuse to surrender office after losing an election. Donald Trump was the only president to unleash an insurrection to try to hold onto office. And now, having lawfully returned to power, he has not concealed his desire to remain after his current term ends.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised his followers that if he was elected, things would be “fixed so good” that “in four years, you don't have to vote again.” And, after predicting his election to a second four-year term, Trump told another audience “we’re probably entitled to another four after that.”

Trump has said he is “not joking.” “A lot of people want me to do it,” he told NBC News this Spring. “There are methods which you could do it.”

What method does Trump have in mind? Here are some ways Trump could use the military to unconstitutionally retain power:

Arrest or detain voters.  Recall Trump’s baseless assertion that undocumented immigrants are voting en masse in American elections. With the military placed in key cities as a “crime fighting” force, Trump could use the soldiers and his masked ICE agents to remove Hispanics and other “suspect” voters from polling places, on the claim the soldiers are “ensuring election integrity.” Troops at polling places arresting people would certainly also frighten others away from the polls.

Seize voting machines.  In 2020 Trump explored having Homeland Security or the Defense Department take control of voting machines in swing states. Attorney General Robert Barr reportedly shot down the suggestion.

But loyal sycophants Attorney General Pam Bondi or “War” Department Secretary Hegseth might well direct their departments to obey Trump’s orders to confiscate voting machines – and later report Trump’s amazing, landslide electoral victory.

Cancel elections because of an “emergency.”  Donald Trump is the master of emergencies. He might manufacture one to justify suspending elections.

Trump claimed a handful of disruptive protests against ICE raids in Los Angeles constituted a “rebellion,” requiring a military response. And he falsely asserted crime was “totally out of control in the District of Columbia” to rationalize the troop takeover of the nation’s capital. Now he threatens to send troops into Chicago, Baltimore and other cities that tend to vote Democratic.

As Trump prepares to rig the 2028 election as best he can, millions of Americans will take to the streets against his illegal candidacy. Trump has little tolerance for the constitutional right to assemble and protest. In June 2025 he warned: “For those people who want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force.” During the widespread peaceful demonstrations over the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Trump asked his Defense Secretary about protestors near the White House. “Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

The Defense Secretary at the time did not grant Trump’s wish. But loyalist Hegseth is not likely to oppose any Trump suggestion.

A president who whipped up a mob to seize the Capitol in January 2021 could mobilize right-wing militias and MAGA forces for political violence before an election, and Trump might assert that elections had to be suspended until “order” was (someday) restored. Troops would enforce “calm” as the election was dismantled.

These scenarios only seem far-fetched because we still find it difficult to contemplate an American president engaging in naked, lethal dictatorial action.

Killing eleven people off Venezuela was Donald Trump’s out of town try-out. Trump’s militarization of our cities, if not resisted, could lead to the termination of free elections in America.

Mobilizing for the next election is not enough. The danger is now and we must resist now. We must withhold our cooperation from Trump’s authoritarian moves, refuse to obey in advance, pressure the institutions we are associated with to stand up for our constitutional democracy, and peacefully take to the streets to demonstrate the scope of the resistance. It is not too late. But if democracy is to be rescued, we must be the rescuers ourselves.

Don’t just blow your horn. Get out of the car and join the protest.

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning. He's also a longtime contributor to Progressive Charlestown. His writing can also be found on his Substack, Reasoning Together with Mitchell Zimmerman.

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You may also be interested in his road-trip novel / social thriller Mississippi Reckoning. Read an excerpt. Read the Progressive Charlestown review HERE.