WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that his administration has deemed terrorist organizations, according to people familiar with the matter.
The decision to bring the U.S. military into the fight is the most aggressive step so far in the administration’s escalating campaign against the cartels. It signals Trump’s continued willingness to use military forces to carry out what has primarily been considered a law enforcement responsibility to curb the flow of fentanyl and other illegal drugs.
The order provides an official basis for the possibility of direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels.
U.S. military officials have started drawing up options for how the military could go after the groups, the people familiar with the conversations said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive internal deliberations.
But directing the military to crack down on the illicit trade also raises legal issues, including whether it would count as “murder” if U.S. forces acting outside of a congressionally authorized armed conflict were to kill civilians — even criminal suspects — who pose no imminent threat.
It is unclear what White House, Pentagon and State Department lawyers have said about the new directive or whether the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has produced an authoritative opinion assessing the legal issues.
Already this year, Trump has deployed National Guard and active duty troops to the southwest border to choke off the flow of drugs as well as immigrants, and has increased surveillance and drug interdiction efforts.
When he returned to office in January, Trump signed an order directing the State Department to start labeling drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
In February, the State Department designated Tren de Aragua, Mara Salvatrucha (known as MS-13) and several other groups as foreign terrorist organizations, saying that they constituted “a national-security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime.”
Two weeks ago, the Trump administration added the Venezuelan Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, to a list of specially designated global terrorist groups, asserting that it is headed by President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and other high-ranking officials in his administration.
On Thursday, the Justice and State Departments announced that the U.S. government is doubling a reward — to $50 million — for information leading to the arrest of Maduro, who has been indicted on drug trafficking charges. The administration again described him as a cartel head, and Attorney General Pam Bondi said he “will not escape justice and he will be held accountable for his despicable crimes.”
Asked about Trump’s authorization for military force against the cartels, Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said in an email that “President Trump’s top priority is protecting the homeland, which is why he took the bold step to designate several cartels and gangs as foreign terrorist organizations.”
The Defense Department declined to comment on the new directive.
Unilateral military assaults on cartels would be a marked escalation in the long drive to curb drug trafficking, putting U.S. forces in a lead role on the front lines against often well-armed and well-financed organizations. A sustained campaign would also likely raise further issues related to Trump’s push to use the military more aggressively to back a variety of his policies, often in the face of legal and constitutional constraints.
Past U.S. military involvement in countering drug operations in Latin America have sometimes pushed at legal limits. But those operations were framed as providing support for law enforcement authorities.
In 1989, President George H.W. Bush sent more than 20,000 troops into Panama to arrest its strongman leader, Manuel Noriega, who had been indicted in the United States on charges of drug trafficking.
Ahead of the operation, William P. Barr, who then led the Office of Legal Counsel and was the attorney general in Trump’s first term, wrote a disputed memo saying it was within Bush’s authority to direct law-enforcement arrests of fugitives overseas without the consent of foreign states. The United Nations General Assembly condemned the Panama action as a “flagrant violation of international law.”
In the 1990s, the U.S. military assisted Colombian and Peruvian antidrug law enforcement activities by sharing information about civilian flights suspected of carrying drugs — like radar data and communications intercepts. But after those governments started shooting down such planes, the Clinton administration in 1994 halted the assistance for months.
The Office of Legal Counsel produced an opinion saying that military officers who provided such information while knowing it would be used to summarily shoot down those aircraft could be putting themselves at risk of later prosecution. Congress eventually modified U.S. law to permit such assistance.
And the Navy has long participated in intercepting vessels in international waters that are suspected of smuggling drugs toward the United States. But naval ships typically do so as a law enforcement operation, working under the command of a U.S. Coast Guard officer. Under an 1878 law called the Posse Comitatus Act, it is generally illegal to use the military to perform law enforcement functions.
The U.S. military has also conducted joint anti-drug training exercises with other countries, including with Colombian and Mexican troops. The military also provided equipment and aircraft to former Drug Enforcement Administration squads that mentored and deployed with — and sometimes got into firefights alongside — local antidrug officers in countries like Honduras. The program ended in 2017.
But Trump’s new directive appears to envision a different approach, focused on U.S. forces directly capturing or killing people involved in the drug trade.
Labeling the cartels as terrorist groups allows the United States “to use other elements of American power, intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, whatever, to target these groups if we have an opportunity to do it,” Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, said on Thursday in an interview with the Catholic news outlet EWTN. “We have to start treating them as armed terrorist organizations, not simply drug dealing organizations.”
Legal specialists said that under U.S. law, imposing sanctions against a group by declaring it a “terrorist” entity can block its assets and make it harder for its members to do business or travel, but does not provide legal authority for wartime-style operations targeting it with armed force.
In his first term, Trump became captivated by the idea of bombing drug labs in Mexico, an idea his defense secretary at the time, Mark Esper, later portrayed as ludicrous in his memoir, and which provoked outrage from Mexican officials.
The idea of using military force, however, took root among Republicans and became a talking point in the 2024 election cycle. Trump vowed on the campaign trail to deploy Special Operations troops and naval forces to, as he put it, declare war on the cartels.
The retired Rear Adm. James E. McPherson, who served as the top uniformed lawyer for the navy in the early 2000s, said it would be “a major breach of international law” to use military force in another country’s territory and without its government’s consent unless certain exceptions were met, but that such limits do not apply to unflagged vessels in international waters.
There are also domestic legal constraints. Congress legally authorized the use of military force against al-Qaida after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but that authorization does not extend to any and all groups the executive branch calls terrorists.
That means military action against cartels would apparently have to rely on a claim about Trump’s constitutional authority to act in national self-defense, perhaps against fentanyl overdoses. McPherson noted that the administration has pushed aggressively broad understandings of Trump’s unilateral power.
It is not clear what rules of engagement would govern military action against cartels. But any operation that set out to kill people based on their suspected status as members of a sanctioned cartel, and outside the context of an armed conflict, would raise legal issues involving laws against murder and a long-standing executive order banning assassinations, said Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who is a specialist in the laws of war.
“Under traditional executive branch lawyering, it would be hard to see some random drug trafficker meeting the threshold for the self-defense exception to the assassination ban,” he said.
Alternatively, the military could carry out capture operations, reserving lethal force for self-defense if troops met resistance.
But captures could raise other tricky legal issues, Finucane added, including about the scope of the military’s ability to hold prisoners as wartime-style detainees without congressional authorization. Or the military could instead transfer any prisoners to the Justice Department for prosecution in civilian court.
In February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the top lawyers for the military services, or judge advocates general. The three-star uniformed lawyers are supposed to give independent and nonpolitical advice about international laws of war and domestic legal constraints on the armed forces.
The administration has also largely sidelined the Office of Legal Counsel, the Justice Department arm that traditionally serves as a powerful gatekeeper in U.S. government, including by deciding whether proposed policies are legally permissible.
Late last month, the Senate confirmed Earl Matthews to be Pentagon general counsel, and T. Elliot Gaiser to lead the Office of Legal Counsel. Interpreting what would be legally permissible in terms of using military force against cartels may be an early test for both of the new appointees.
The push to label cartels as terrorist organizations has extended to several that are based in Mexico, as well as a coalition of Haitian gangs that have helped plunge their country into chaos.
In April, Trump proposed to President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico that she allow the U.S. military to fight drug cartels on her nation’s soil, but she rejected the idea.
In announcing two weeks ago that it was imposing sanctions on the Venezuelan group Cartel de los Soles, the Treasury Department accused the cartel of providing material support to Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, which it said in turn were “threatening the peace and security of the United States.”
Two days later, Rubio issued a statement accusing Maduro of stealing elections and saying he was not the president of Venezuela and that his “regime is not the legitimate government.”
“Maduro is the leader of the designated narco-terrorist organization Cartel de los Soles, and he is responsible for trafficking drugs into the United States and Europe,” Rubio said. “Maduro, currently indicted by our nation, has corrupted Venezuela’s institutions to assist the cartel’s criminal narco-trafficking scheme into the United States.”
The question of how to combat cartels trafficking drugs, people and other illicit goods has animated much of Trump’s domestic and foreign policy in his second term.
Early on, the United States stepped up secret drone flights over Mexico to hunt for fentanyl labs, according to U.S. officials.
The covert program began under the Biden administration but intensified under Trump as he and his CIA director, John Ratcliffe, vowed more aggressive action against Mexican cartels.
The CIA has not been authorized to use the drones to take lethal action, and officials do not envision employing that option. For now, CIA officers in Mexico pass information collected by the drones to Mexican officials.
