The sleek 30-foot cigarette boat was leveled off, on plane, its twin 200-horse-power outboards whining as it scudded at top speed over the light chop. Two men were seated aft, their cargo — 1,200 pounds of brick cocaine — hidden amidships beneath a tightly tethered white tarp. They had business to the north and were in a hurry to get there, unaware they were being closely observed.
“Here they come,” said the pilot into his mic. “Right on schedule.”
“Roger that,” came the reply. “Proceed at will. Take ’em out.”
Forty seconds later, just a mile north of the Helena bridge, the boat was hit with high explosives, disintegrating instantly, showering the muddy Mississippi with pieces of its hull, its powdery cargo, and bloody body parts.
“Got ’em,” said the pilot.
“Yep, it’s all on video,” came the reply. “Nice work. See you back in Memphis.”
Far-fetched? Not really. Is anything far-fetched at a time when American cities are occupied by anonymous, masked, paramilitary operatives racially profiling people and seizing them off the street without warrants? Is it far-fetched that a president would set up the American military as judge, jury, and executioner, having killed, as I write this, 61 people cruising in international waters? It’s barbaric, immoral, and un-American — or at least it used to be.
The victims in these 14 attacks (and counting) are nameless, faceless, and dead, and none of those three things is an accident. The administration claims the unknown people they’ve killed were running drugs to the United States, but they’ve offered no proof for that claim, and they clearly don’t intend to.
Six weeks ago, Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker, Armed Services Committee chairman, and his Democratic counterpart, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, wrote a letter asking Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to provide a legal basis for the military’s attacks on alleged drug boats. They also asked to see the directives Hegseth approved for the strikes and unedited videos.
They got no response until Monday, when Trump’s Justice Department simply proclaimed that the United States had the right to continue summarily executing people it deemed drug runners. Period.
Trump himself has said on numerous occasions that he plans to continue the military attacks without Congress passing an official declaration of war, a clear violation of the law.
“I’m not going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war,” he said. “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay? We’re going to kill them, you know, they’re going to be, like, dead.”
Yeah, like, dead, dude. Okay?
Even if you take the administration at its word (a dubious proposition, at best), and accept that it has irrefutable evidence that its air strikes are killing drug runners headed to the United States, it’s still wrong. Getting convicted of drug trafficking will get you sent to prison, but it’s not a capital offense. In fact, no one in the United States has been sentenced to death solely for drug crimes since the death penalty was reinstated in 1988. But anonymous brown people in small boats in the middle of the ocean? Sure, kill them, like, dead. Who’s going to stop us? If we accidentally blow up a fishing boat, well … oops.
In July 2024, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States granted presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts.” At the time, the concern was that it granted Trump freedom from prosecution for the crimes he was charged with from his first administration, such as hiding official documents and interfering with a federal election, but legal scholars also saw it as creating a potential permission slip for a president to abuse his authority.
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the SCOTUS decision “effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding.” She wrote further: “If a president orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune, immune, immune. … In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”
Trump once boasted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters!” That bit of hyperbole has become nightmarishly real, and now we’re all in the same boat.