Donald Trump’s administration has authorized the CIA to covertly operate inside Venezuela, marking a significant escalation of an aggressive U.S. military campaign against Nicolas Maduro’s regime.
The authorization reportedly grants the CIA permission to take “covert action” against Maduro and his government, either unilaterally or as part of a larger military operation.
Trump told reporters at the White House Wednesday that he “authorized” CIA operations because Venezuela “emptied their prisons into the United States of America” and flooded the country with drugs.
Last month, the administration declared the United States is formally engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels that the president has labeled “unlawful combatants,” according to a confidential notice to members of Congress. The notice appears to invoke extraordinary wartime powers to justify a series of missile strikes targeting boats off the coast of Venezuela and in the Caribbean that have killed at least 27 people in recent weeks.
Trump said defense officials are now “looking at land” strikes in Venezuela.
“We are certainly looking at land now because we’ve got the sea under control,” he said Wednesday.
The latest action follows another U.S. airstrike that destroyed a boat off Venezuela’s coast, which the president and administration officials claim targeted drug traffickers.
Critics have argued the campaign amounts to illegal extrajudicial killings, while members of Congress and civil rights groups are pressing the administration for evidence and the legal memos shared among White House officials to justify the killings.
“All available evidence suggests that President Trump’s lethal strikes in the Caribbean constitute murder, pure and simple,” according to a statement from Jeffrey Stein, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “The public deserves to know how our government is justifying these attacks as lawful, and, given the stakes, immediate public scrutiny of its apparently radical theories is imperative.”
Trump did not explicitly rule out targeting Maduro directly, dismissing a question about whether the administration would take action against Venezuela’s elected leader as “ridiculous.”
“I don’t want to answer a question like that,” he said Wednesday.
Trump and administration officials have repeatedly claimed that alleged drug boats are tied to Tren de Aragua gang members and “narcoterrorists” but have not publicly presented evidence as the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth share videos of the strikes on social media.
Trump claimed members of Congress have been given “information that they were loaded up with drugs.”
“That’s what matters,” he said.
The president claimed the boats erupted with “drug dust” and “fentanyl dust” when they were destroyed.
“We know when they go out, we have much information about each boat that goes out. Deep, strong information,” he said.
In January, Trump issued an executive order designating Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization, paving the way for his order invoking the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport suspected gang members.
Neither the Alien Enemies Act nor “foreign terrorist organization” designations allow for lethal force.
Deploying lethal force on suspicion of illegal activity “violates the letter and spirit of more than a century of international standards and the United States’ own regulations for maritime operations against civilian vessels in international waters,” according to the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights advocacy organization.
Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino has accused the Trump administration of trying to “force a regime change.”
“I want to warn the population: We have to prepare ourselves because the irrationality with which the U.S. empire operates is not normal,” Padrino said in televised remarks last week. “It’s anti-political, anti-human, warmongering, rude and vulgar.”
