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Democrat lawmakers are increasingly turning up the heat on the Trump administration over its series of military strikes on suspected drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean since September, most recently focusing on alleged drug runners who survived an initial strike and were killed by a follow-up.
“If the reports are true, [Secretary of War] Pete Hegseth likely committed a war crime when he gave an illegal order that led to the killing of incapacitated survivors of the U.S. strike in the Caribbean,” Nevada Democrat Sen. Sen. Jacky Rosen said in a statement earlier in December of strikes that killed suspected traffickers.
The White House told Fox News Digital on Friday that the Democrat criticism echoes the “Maryland Man” hoax, referring to the arrest of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an accused MS-13 gang member who was illegally residing in Maryland.
Abrego Garcia received an outpouring of support from Democrat lawmakers in March over his deportation to El Salvador, with lawmakers traveling to El Salvador to meet with him, and media outlets describing him as a “Maryland man.”
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“’Innocent fisherman’ is the new ‘Maryland Man’ hoax – just like the media tried to paint MS-13 human smuggler Kilmar Abrego Garcia as ‘father of the year,’ they are now running cover for foreign terrorists smuggling deadly narcotics intended to murder Americans. President Trump is using every element of American power to take on the cartels and stop deadly drugs from flooding into our country – just like he promised on the campaign trail,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told Fox Digital.
Trump has long vowed to take on the ongoing opioid epidemic and stop foreign drugs and precursor chemicals from flowing into the U.S. The administration has defended the at least 22 strikes, which have killed dozens of suspected drug criminals, on suspected narco-boats as protecting the U.S. from cartels looking to “poison Americans.”
“These narco-terrorists are bringing drugs to our shores to poison Americans at home – and they will not succeed,” Hegseth wrote in a post on X in November. “The Department will treat them EXACTLY how we treated Al-Qaeda. We will continue to track them, map them, hunt them, and kill them.”
Democrats have increasingly taken issue with a pair of strikes on Sept. 2 against an alleged drug boat from Venezuela. The White House confirmed the military carried out an initial strike on the boat before firing off a second that killed two suspected traffickers, sparking Democrats to claim the administration committed potential war crimes.
“You have two individuals in clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, who were killed by the United States,” Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters earlier in December of the strikes.
While Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly shot back, “Going after survivors in the water, that is clearly not lawful.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Kelly’s and Himes’ respective offices for comment on the White House statement and the opioid epidemic in the U.S., but did not immediately receive replies.
Rosen’s office told Fox News Digital on Friday in response: “If Donald Trump is serious about fighting drug smuggling, why did he pardon the former President of Honduras who was convicted for smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States? And why did the Trump Administration threaten to cut millions of dollars in funding to address the opioid epidemic? The American people deserve to know.”
Republicans such as Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, remarked that video of the survivors allegedly showed individuals who wanted to “stay in the fight.”
“I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat, loaded with drugs bound for the United States, back over so they could stay in the fight,” Cotton said.
Morgan Murphy, an Alabama Republican Senate candidate, told Fox News Digital that he’s seeing “utter hypocrisy from a party of theater kids who just don’t care about the lives being lost to the drug trade” when asked about Democrats sounding off about the strikes.
“For nearly a decade, Democrats lauded President Obama as the ‘Prince of Peace,’ even though his bomb strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia killed hundreds of civilians. None of those countries were at war with the United States or targeted American civilians,” Murphy said, referring to how former President Barack Obama faced war-crimes accusations from critics over his administration’s drone strikes and civilian casualties in countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan.
Murphy served as the head of public diplomacy for the president’s special envoy to Russia and Ukraine in the Trump administration before launching his Senate campaign earlier in the fall. He is a captain in the U.S. Navy Reserves, as well as a veteran of the Afghanistan war, where he was awarded the Defense Meritorious Service Medal and the Afghanistan Campaign Medal, among others.
“But when President Trump pushes his own effort to stop human smugglers and drug dealers who have done untold harm and killed millions of Americans, they want to place the president and secretary of war on a show trial,” he said.
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The Trump administration launched the strikes after the president campaigned to end the flow of narcotics into the U.S. from nations such as China, Mexico and Central and South America. The Trump administration turned its attention toward Venezuela, which is led by dictatorial president Nicolás Maduro, saying the U.S. is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels after the groups evolved into transnational terror organizations.
The administration has defended the strikes as necessary to curb the flow of opioid deaths in the U.S., while experts have also said the pressure campaign on Venezuela is likely aimed to also oust Maduro as leader of the oil-rich nation.
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The CDC found that an estimated 806,000 people died from an opioid overdose between 1999-2023. The opioid crisis is viewed as unfolding in three waves, beginning in the 1990s with the increase in prescriptions to opioids, the CDC reported, followed by the second wave that began in 2010, when heroin overdoses spiked, and finally the current third wave of deaths involving synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl.
The crisis has slowed from its high of 81,806 opioid-related deaths in 2022, with 2023 marking the first annual decline in deaths since 2018, according to CDC data. There were an estimated 79,358 opioid deaths in 2023, according to CDC data.
As of Thursday, an estimated 86 suspected drug traffickers have died in the strikes.
Fentanyl has long been on the medical market to treat individuals suffering with severe pain, but has since become an illegal manufactured substance by transnational criminal organizations, such as cartels.
Trump vowed in his 2022 re-election announcement that cartels would face the U.S. wrath over overdose deaths upon his return to the Oval Office.
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“We will wage war upon the cartels and stop the fentanyl and deadly drugs from killing 200,000 Americans per year,” he said in November 2024, previewing his administration.
Several Republican members of the House Armed Services Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee told Fox News Digital that the Trump administration has been well within its rights to act against Maduro’s regime. They added that they’re eager for more information after several strikes against alleged Venezuelan drug boats and Trump’s heightened rhetoric targeting Maduro.
“These boats, they’re stacked up with bags of white powder, that’s mostly fentanyl and other drugs too,” Trump said in September. “Every boat kills 25,000.”
Democrats in past decades have promoted fiery rhetoric focused on taking out foreign narco-terrorist, including then-Delaware Sen. Joe Biden calling for “another D-Day” to end the war on drugs in a 1989 address criticizing Republican President George H.W. Bush’s administration for not taking strong enough action on the crack cocaine epidemic.
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“Let’s go after the drug lords where they live with an international strike force. There must be no safe haven for these narco-terrorists and they must know it,” Biden said in the 1989 speech.
Fox News Digital’s Elizabeth Elkind contributed to this report.
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