Far-right activist Laura Loomer challenged the Trump administration’s justification for the more than a dozen strikes against Venezuelan boats allegedly carrying drugs.
Since September, U.S. strikes against alleged drug-running vessels in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean have killed more than 80 people, whom the administration has dubbed “narcoterrorists.” President Donald Trump has claimed that the strikes are meant to protect Americans from the spread of fentanyl, the leading cause of overdose deaths in the U.S.
Loomer, however, pointed out that Venezuela isn’t known for smuggling fentanyl into the United States.
“I have no sympathy for narcoterrorists being killed,” she wrote in a social media post Monday. “It’s just worth noting” a large portion of the drug supply coming into the U.S. “is coming in from Mexico, especially the fentanyl. Fentanyl isn’t being manufactured in Venezuela,” she said.
A May assessment by the Drug Enforcement Administration linked fentanyl supplies in the U.S. to China-based chemical supply companies and Mexican transnational criminal organizations.
The assessment didn’t mention Venezuela in its “fentanyl” section.
Although she didn’t specifically cite the DEA assessment, Loomer wondered “when can we expect to see air strikes on the Mexican cartels in Mexico? Or what about China, since China produces the chemicals that are used to make fentanyl in Mexico?”
“It makes a lot of sense to start with neutralizing the Mexican cartels since that’s where most of the damage is coming from,” she continued.
Addressing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directly, she added: “It makes me wonder why this hasn’t been done… surely the @DeptofWar knows where all of the Mexican drug lords live.”
In September, Trump told military leaders: “You know, you see these boats, they’re stacked up with bags of white powder. That’s mostly fentanyl and other drugs, too.”
That same month, when asked about evidence that a vessel targeted in a strike was carrying drugs, the president said: “We have proof. All you have to do is look at the cargo that was spattered all over the ocean — big bags of cocaine and and fentanyl all over the place.”
However, military officials told lawmakers in a closed-door briefing last month that cocaine, not fentanyl, was on board the boats targeted by U.S. strikes.
California Democratic Rep. Sara Jacobs, who attended a briefing, told the New York Times: “Their rationale for the strikes is because fentanyl is killing so many Americans, but these strikes are targeting cocaine.”
Tren de Aragua — which Trump designated as a foreign terrorist organization earlier this year — conducts “small-scale drug trafficking activities such as the distribution of tusi,” a psychedelic drug also called “pink cocaine,” the DEA said in its assessment. Both Trump and Hegseth have alleged Tren de Aragua members were killed in several strikes while trafficking narcotics.
In her social media post Monday, Loomer also claimed that drugs from Venezuela account for just a small portion of those entering the U.S., alleging most of that is cocaine. However, the DEA assessment also found that Colombia, followed by Peru and Bolivia, are the “primary source” countries for cocaine entering the United States.
Experts have also not linked Venezuela to an influx of cocaine in the U.S., instead saying the country moves the drug to Europe.
“Fentanyl is not coming out of Venezuela. Fentanyl comes from Mexico,” Christopher Hernandez-Roy, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, told NBC News last month. “What’s coming out of Venezuela is cocaine.”
A U.S. official with expertise in counternarcotics efforts similarly told the outlet that cocaine makes up roughly 90 percent of the drugs coming from Venezuela, but it’s not coming to the U.S. It’s “almost all destined for Europe,” the official said.
Annie Pforzheimer, a former senior U.S. diplomat who specialized in counternarcotics and Venezuela, told the New York Times that Venezuela is a “transshipment point to Europe” and that the country “is not a fentanyl node, so linkage to the idea that lethal action is justified because Americans are dying is so incredibly attenuated at this point.”
