Trump’s Strategy Against Venezuelan Gangs is Self-Defeating

After a series of strikes on nonmilitary vessels in international waters, the Pentagon informed Congress it considers suspected members of Venezuelan gangs to be ‘unlawful combatants,’ and America is engaged in ‘non-international armed conflict’ with them – without specifying which entities this covers. Trump has also authorised the CIA to conduct lethal covert action in Venezuela and positioned US armed forces off the Venezuelan coast. Confronting violent criminal organisations is a legitimate aim, but the administration’s case is internally inconsistent, its target is amorphous and there is no clear end-state. The White House starts this military adventure on weak footing, reviving the previously metaphorical War on Drugs and infusing it with tactics borrowed from the much more literal War on Terror. Aggregating extraordinary legal authorities to pursue a vague threat with no limiting principle is a dangerous approach which may ultimately prove self-defeating.

The Wrong Target

The administration's framing of Venezuela as a primary drug threat to the United States is at odds with the government's own data. According to America’s Consolidated Counterdrug Database – the official interagency source for tracking drug flows – approximately 210 metric tons of cocaine transited Venezuela in 2018, representing less than 10% of US-bound cocaine. For context, over six times as much cocaine (1,400 metric tons) passed through Guatemala that same year. The reality is that 90% of cocaine entering the United States is produced in Colombia and 90% enters via the US-Mexico land border; Venezuelan routes primarily serve Caribbean and European markets instead.

The focus on the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) as part of a wider crackdown on drug trafficking is especially peculiar since TdA is a bit player in that corner of the criminal world. The Treasury Department described it as an entity primarily engaged in human trafficking and extortion, for which drug trafficking is an ‘additional revenue source.’ Federal indictments document retail drug sales and small-scale trafficking, while InSight Crime's three-year investigation found ‘little evidence’ that TdA possesses ‘the criminal connections, logistical capacity, or state penetration required to move large shipments of drugs for transnational networks.’

By treating a secondary player in a tertiary corridor as if it were the Sinaloa Cartel, the administration has constructed an enforcement strategy that gives a semblance of bold action without taking on the primary actors.

Abusing the Law

Long understood as profit-driven transnational criminal enterprises, multiple Latin American gangs have recently been reclassified. On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency to confront them and another effectively labelling them terrorists.

Terrorist designations reflect a fundamentally different understanding of what a violent group is and how it functions. A criminal enterprise operates primarily for profit and is countered by civilian law enforcement, while a Foreign Terrorist Organisation pursues ideological/political objectives through violence and can be addressed through military action abroad. Criminals and terrorists may occasionally overlap in tactics, but they are seldom confused for one another. Consider two malfeasant aviation students, one of whom skips lectures on professional standards and regulations because he intends to transport drugs and illicit goods, while the other skips the part where they teach how to land the planes. The administration is essentially claiming that these two equally fit the profile of a ‘terrorist.’

The next daring legal gambit came in March when President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law from 1798, which was then used to summarily deport alleged gang members without due process. The proclamation singled out Tren de Aragua, declaring that it was perpetrating an ‘invasion’ of the United States. It explicitly stated that TdA was operating ‘at the direction’ of the Maduro regime, rendering its members ‘alien enemies’ subject to detention and deportation without standard legal protections. Intelligence reports contradicted this claim and the administration later shifted its messaging away from proxy warfare, but the terrorist designation still forms a key part of the pivot from civilian criminal to enemy combatant.

The new strikes on alleged drug boats are being justified by the 2001 Authorisation for Use of Military Force (AUMF). The main argument now appears to be that because drugs can kill people, the United States could be at war with anyone involved in the drug trade. This approach is patently absurd: by this logic, every street dealer is a terrorist and an enemy combatant.

A Self-Inflicted Injury

During Trump's first term, his administration pursued Venezuela through conventional channels such as diplomatic isolation (recognizing Juan Guaidó as interim president) and comprehensive sanctions targeting the oil sector and individual regime officials. The question, then, is not whether Trump is ignorant of traditional tools, but whether their failure to achieve the administration’s desired outcomes justifies the extraordinary legal measures he is now invoking.

The administration may consider the exhaustion of diplomatic pressure, sanctions, and traditional law enforcement to be justification for more aggressive measures, but the current approach comes with a new set of risks. Far from backing down, Maduro is now gearing up for a fight, and if further confrontation results in American deaths, Trump may be cornered into escalating from a ‘special military operation’ into a small war, with all the domestic consequences that would entail. Even his allies are growing uneasy with this unexpected departure from the isolationist foreign policy he campaigned on. It comes at a poor time, with his domestic popularity low and midterm elections ahead, in which his party is expected to lose ground in the House.

The policy of striking boats without Congressional approval or formal regional support could also backfire in other unpredictable ways. The scenario Trump appears to want, in which Maduro is removed from power, would be compromised if American strikes kill innocent Venezuelan civilians. This would hand the Maduro regime a propaganda tool to shore up domestic support, and potentially ward off a popular uprising if the Venezuelan public becomes ambivalent about the prospect of American intervention.

Trump’s approach also risks weakening American legitimacy in pursuing its broader foreign policy goals. By building its Venezuela strategy on such a shaky foundation, the current administration may be repeating the same mistakes for which it has sharply criticised its predecessors. During the Iraq War (which Trump denounced), despite the legitimate grounds for confronting Saddam Hussein's regime – documented human rights abuses, regional destabilisation and defiance of UN resolutions – the Bush administration chose to base the war on claims of weapons of mass destruction. When those justifications proved false, support for the administration’s actions collapsed.

Venezuela presents a similar dynamic. Legitimate reasons exist to challenge Maduro's regime, primarily his systematic human rights violations and his refusal to relinquish power after losing the 2024 election. Rather than focus on this, and against all the evidence, the administration has chosen to justify military action against individual Venezuelans through exaggerated narratives painting a prison gang as a terrorist group, invaders or a paramilitary whose weapon is drugs for sale. When that narrative inevitably unravels under scrutiny, the administration will have squandered credibility it could have spent on more defensible interventions.

Conclusion

The Trump administration's shotgun approach appears driven more by political messaging than legal validity or practical impact. Traditional law enforcement tools would have provided a more legitimate and defensible path forward without compromising the rule of law, but the administration has increasingly side-lined them in favour of a pyrotechnic approach to combating crime. Even while the civilian Justice Department is actively pursuing prosecutions against TdA members, the administration is signalling the intent to use a military justice approach which includes stretching definitions beyond belief to treat boats in international waters as enemy vessels under the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). The rules of engagement, evidentiary standards and constitutional protections differ dramatically across these frameworks and abusing wartime laws would, in the long term, actually diminish the government’s ability to keep these criminals incarcerated. This means the government now has a perverse incentive to kill, not capture – a strategic weakness which was on full display when the US released the first two survivors of the strikes to their countries of origin.

This approach is also marching the United States toward a constitutional crisis. In just one example, when the National Intelligence Council concluded that TdA ‘does not operate at the direction of Venezuela's leader’ and lacks the resources and organisation to carry out a state-coordinated paramilitary campaign, this assessment undermined the legal foundation for the extraordinary deportations which took place in March 2025. If the educated assessment of the broader security community invalidates the foundations of the government’s case, it begs the question: What happens when everyone knows the Government is deceiving the court to justify its new methods?

In the most pessimistic interpretation of events, Donald Trump is giving himself extraordinary and concerning new powers, with ominous domestic and international implications. In the most optimistic interpretation, the administration is simply unable to choose a coherent message, conduct a proper threat assessment, or correctly apply American law.

© Gil Guerra and Emma Isabella Sage, 2025, published by RUSI with permission of the authors.

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