US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he has every authorization needed for US military strikes on vessels just off the coast of Venezuela carrying illegal drugs.
Hegseth was speaking in a Fox News interview broadcast on Sunday. The United States killed four drug smugglers in a strike in the Caribbean Sea on Friday, at least the fourth such attack in recent weeks.
"We have every authorization needed. These are designated as foreign terrorist organizations," Hegseth said in an interview on Fox News' The Sunday Briefing.
Washington has cited the US Constitution, war powers, designation of drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, the right to self-defense and international law on unlawful combatants as the legal basis for the strikes.
Left-wing legal commentators and some lawmakers argued that using military force in international waters against alleged criminals bypasses due process, violates law enforcement norms, lacks a clear legal foundation under US and international law and is not justified by the cartels’ terrorist designation.
"If you're in our hemisphere, if you're in the Caribbean, if you're north of Venezuela and you want to traffic drugs to the United States, you are a legitimate target of the United States military," Hegseth said.
Trump on Sunday said the US military buildup in the Caribbean had halted drug trafficking from South America. "There's no drugs coming into the water. And we'll look at what phase two is," he told reporters at the White House.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Sunday told his Venezuelan counterpart that the country condemns the US strikes and is concerned about the dangers of potential US escalation in the Caribbean.
(Reporting by Jasper Ward, Leah Douglas and Andrea Shalal in Washington; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Cynthia Osterman)