At a Justice Department conference in February, then-acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove told the department's top drug prosecutors that the Trump administration wasn't interested in interdicting suspected drug vessels at sea anymore. Instead, he said, the U.S. should "just sink the boats," according to three people present for the speech.
At the time of Bove's comments, President Trump had only been back in office for a month. The White House had made clear that combatting drug cartels and transnational criminal gangs was a priority, but few could envision that six months later the U.S. would be blowing up suspected drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean.
Since the first deadly attack on what the government says was a narco-trafficking vessel off the Venezuelan coast on Sept. 2, the U.S. has conducted some 20 strikes in international waters, killing more than 75 people. The administration says the boats were carrying drugs and posed a direct threat to the United States, but it has not provided any public evidence to support those assertions.
Bove's remarks, which have not previously been publicly reported, suggest at least some members of the administration were considering this policy shift as early as six months before the boat strikes began.
NPR spoke about the Trump administration's policies with nine current and former U.S. officials who worked to combat transnational crime. They described a dramatic policy shift, from interdicting suspected drug boats, seizing the drugs, detaining and often prosecuting the crew, as the U.S. has done for decades — to blasting them out of the water and killing those on board.
All of the individuals spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. They questioned the legality of the deadly strikes — many referred to them as murder — and expressed doubts that the new policy would be more effective at stemming the flow of illicit drugs into the United States. Several of them said it may ultimately prove counterproductive.
"There's an awful lot of frustration with the administration abandoning what has been one of the most effective ways of going after organized crime in favor of things that sound macho but get you nowhere," said one former DOJ official who worked on maritime interdictions. "The most devastating thing is killing people on the high seas without any due process or evidence of violence. Just preemptive strikes."
In a statement, a Justice Department spokesperson said that the department "along with the entire Trump Administration is committed to ending the illegal trafficking of deadly drugs into our country and leaks from disgruntled former employees will not distract us from our mission."
'Jaw-dropping' comments about sinking boats
More than six months before the strikes began, Bove addressed a conference for the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, known as OCDETF, at the Justice Department's National Advocacy Center on the University of South Carolina campus.
More than 100 people were in the audience for Bove's closing speech. Among them were the leaders of OCDETF's 19 strike forces, including the three that focus on intercepting drug shipments at sea. These task forces played the leading role in U.S. government efforts to combat transnational organized crime and illicit narcotics.
Speaking via video teleconference, Bove expressed skepticism about maritime interdictions and the value of prosecuting low-level drug runners caught at sea.
"That's when he said that we're not going to worry so much about interdictions, we're just going to sink the boats," said one of the attendees.
"I looked around at others in that room when he said that, and jaws literally dropped," this person said. "The way people interpreted that was not, 'We're going to interdict and process the folks in the boats.' People took that as, 'We're just going to blow up the boats with people in them.'"
Two other attendees said that at the time it was unclear to them whether Bove meant to sink the boats after seizing the drugs and arresting the crew — as the U.S. Coast Guard traditionally does — or sinking them with the crew and drugs still on board.
"It seemed so outlandish I didn't take it seriously. It just didn't seem reasonable until they started blowing boats up, and then holy s—-, does this all go together?" said one former senior DOJ official who was in the room. "Now that you look back on it, I think you can infer he probably meant just sink the boats with the people on them."
A fourth person who was at the conference recalled Bove's comments about ending interdictions but did not remember his remarks about sinking drug boats.
Bove declined to comment for this story.
It is unclear to what extent he was directly involved in administration discussions about military action against narcotraffickers, or the Justice Department's still-secret legal memo drafted over the summer justifying the strikes. Bove left the DOJ after being confirmed by the Senate to serve as a federal judge — a lifetime seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit — in late July, and he received his commission on Aug. 20.
Justice memo justifies strikes' legality
The Trump administration's first lethal strike on a suspected drug boat took place the first week of September in the Caribbean. It expanded strikes in October to the Eastern Pacific as well, and it now has carried out a total of some 20 strikes combined.
Administration officials say the goal of the lethal campaign is to stop the flow of illicit drugs into the United States, although the significant increase in U.S. military troops, ships and aircraft in the Caribbean has fueled speculation that White House's real aim is to topple Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.
The recent arrival of the carrier USS Gerald Ford and its strike group in the Caribbean has significantly added to American firepower in the region and heightened expectations the U.S. could strike Venezuela.
The Trump administration has yet to provide any evidence to the American public to support its assertions that the boats that have been blown up at sea are indeed carrying drugs or that the individuals on board are cartel members.
It also has not provided a full public accounting of its legal justification for hitting boats other than that the president is taking action in self-defense and under his Article II powers as commander-in-chief.
Early this month — after being pressed for weeks by lawmakers — administration officials provided select members of Congress a more detailed briefing on the legal rationale, including the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memo on the strikes, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
The memo concludes that the U.S. is in a non-international armed conflict with the cartels, and that the strikes are being conducted in line with the laws of war. The head of the OLC also told lawmakers the administration wasn't going to seek an extension of war powers because the administration has determined they don't apply, since the American personnel conducting the strikes aren't in danger.
"A self-licking ice cream cone"
The administration's lethal approach marks a huge shift from the traditional maritime interdictions the U.S. has long done.
Those operations involve the U.S. Coast Guard intercepting a drug boat at sea, boarding the vessel, seizing the narcotics, arresting the crew and bringing them back to the U.S. to face prosecution.
The U.S. Coast Guard works off information gathered from U.S. law enforcement and intelligence community sources. The U.S. military, meanwhile, has a hand in detection, monitoring and coordination.
"We used to call it a self-licking ice cream cone," said one former FBI official who worked transnational crime and maritime interdictions. "You stop a boat, you get the bad guys, you use the leverage of prosecuting them to turn them into cooperators."
Investigators would use those cooperators to intercept more drug boats, arrest more low-level traffickers, leverage some of them into cooperators to get more intelligence. This way, over time, the former FBI official said, investigators have been able to work their way up to cartel leadership.
Even when the people detained on a boat didn't have information that helped in a prosecution, they often had tidbits that helped illuminate the cartel network, which American officials then use for intelligence purposes.
"Forgetting the philosophy of whether killing people is right or wrong, when you kill them you can't talk to them. When you grab them, you can," one former senior DOJ official said.
The information that leads to an interdiction comes from human sources as well as what's known as signals intelligence, or electronic surveillance. Current and former officials said in interviews that that information is generally accurate and reliable.
It allows the Coast Guard, for example, to put a cutter at a precise location of a drug boat in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, which is roughly the size of the continental United States.
The current and former officials said the intelligence isn't always 100% accurate. Sometimes the vessel the Coast Guard intercepts is a resupply boat carrying food and fuel for the traffickers, not the actual drugs.
Still, the intelligence that allows the Coast Guard to be in the right place is often built upon a piece of information provided by a human source, which then allows the U.S. government to put its vast electronic spying powers to good use.
These officials said blowing up boats instead of interdicting them will have a compound effect over time on the quality of intelligence.
With the lethal strikes, the U.S. is no longer gathering phones and other electronics off of crew arrested on the high seas, nor is the U.S. questioning the low-level drug runners about who and what they know about the broader trafficking network.
"You need something to tell you where to look," the former DOJ official said. "If you're killing all these people, you just dried up the human intelligence."
Limits to understanding cartels
As the intelligence dwindles, the U.S. government's understanding of the cartels, their money laundering networks, supply chains and business strategies will start to go dark.
In the past, the OCDETF-led interdiction model intercepted around 4% to 6% of known maritime cocaine shipments annually on non-commercial vessels. In fiscal year 2023, for example, the rate was 3.71%, according to a Department of Homeland Security watchdog report from February.
This fall, the Trump administration shuttered OCDETF, and transferred its cases to new Homeland Security Task Forces jointly run by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations.
For those who spent years working on combating drug cartels, there's deep skepticism that the Trump administration's new policy of military strikes will be prevent more drugs from reaching America.
"All this strategy is doing is killing people and the same amount of drugs is getting into the U.S.," the former senior DOJ official said. "You didn't save anybody or increase the number of people you're saving in the U.S. It's extraordinarily shortsighted and I don't think it gets you the goal you want."
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