Since early September, the United States has carried out at least 22 declared military strikes targeting alleged drug-trafficking vessels off the coast of Latin America.
Legal experts and international officials say that the attacks, which have killed at least 86 people, are a violation of the law and represent acts of extrajudicial killing.
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But despite what scholars describe as clear-cut illegality, Trump’s lethal campaign has shown few signs of slowing down, and critics see an alarming shift towards the use of military force against criminal activities.
“I was utterly shocked that the United States would do this,” Ben Saul, the United Nations special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, told Al Jazeera in a telephone interview.
“It shows that the Trump administration has no respect for international law or conventions around the use of force.”
The situation points to a trend of impunity for powerful countries. Though there may be a broad consensus that Trump is breaking international law, it is unclear what legal or political mechanisms could halt his bombing campaign.
“Certainly, trying to rein in a superpower like the United States is something very difficult,” Saul said. “This has to stop from within the US itself.”
‘Guardrails have been eroded’
Experts say that oversight could potentially come from a number of sources.
On the domestic front, the US Congress has the ability to pass legislation barring military strikes or cut off funds for the campaign.
Military members involved in the attacks could also refuse to carry out what they see as unlawful orders.
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Foreign leaders could limit or pause intelligence cooperation with the US.
Thus far, however, few meaningful restraints have been placed on the Trump administration.
Twice, the US Senate has voted to defeat legislation that would have required the White House to obtain congressional support for its bombing campaign.
In October, the first bill failed by a vote of 51 to 48. In November, the second was voted down by a margin of 51 to 49.
On the international side, there have also been reports that the United Kingdom and Colombia considered whether to stop sharing intelligence from the Caribbean with the US.
But officials from both countries have downplayed those reports, with Colombian Interior Minister Armando Benedetti calling the situation a “misunderstanding”.
Other mechanisms meant to assess the legality of the Trump administration’s military actions have faced political pressure.
News outlets such as CNN and NBC News reported that US military lawyers — known as judge advocates general or JAG officers — who questioned the legality of the bombing campaign were sidelined or fired.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has previously said that he does not want military lawyers acting as “roadblocks” to Trump’s policies.
“Military lawyers are only roadblocks if you want to break the law,” said Sarah Harrison, an analyst at the International Crisis Group.
Harrison previously served as an associate general counsel at the Department of Defense, where she advised the military on questions of international law. She said the Trump administration has deliberately weakened institutional norms and legal safeguards meant to prevent the abuse of military power.
“They have established a blueprint to direct the military to commit an unlawful order without resistance,” she said.
“The guardrails inside have been eroded.”
Numerous laws, however, exist to prohibit extrajudicial killings like those Trump is currently carrying out in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific.
Article Two of the UN Charter, for instance, largely prohibits countries from using force internationally, barring an act of self-defence.
The Geneva Conventions, a cornerstone of humanitarian law, also bar military violence against “persons taking no active part” in hostilities.
The Trump administration’s use of “double-tap” strikes — where a second attack is conducted to kill survivors from the first — has raised additional legal concerns.
The Hague Convention explicitly outlaws “no quarter given” policies, wherein soldiers are ordered to execute those who could otherwise be taken prisoner.
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The Trump administration nevertheless denied that any of its strikes violate international or domestic law.
Instead, it argues that the vessels it bombed contained deadly narcotics, and that drug-traffickers are ‘unlawful combatants’ whose transportation of narcotics represents an attack on the US.
“Our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both US and international law, with all actions in complete compliance with the law of armed conflict,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said.
“Lawyers up and down the chain of command have been thoroughly involved in reviewing these operations prior to execution.”
But legal scholars say that the administration’s claims do not hold water.
Rebecca Ingber, a Yale Law School professor who previously served as an adviser to the US Department of State, said that the Trump administration has tried to erase the distinction between criminal activity and an armed attack that would justify a military response.
She compared the administration’s reasoning to the kind of garbled legal analysis an AI assistant like Grok might produce.
“It feels to me that some political actors inside the executive branch have taken all of the statements and memos about the use of force over the last 25 years, jumbled up the words, thrown them into Grok, and asked it to come up with a legal argument,” said Ingber.
“They think they can throw around words like ‘armed conflict’ and ‘terrorist’, and that if they label someone as such, it can give them unlimited authority,” she added.
A pliant Congress
Trump is not the first president to spur concerns about his broad use of military force.
After the attacks on September 11, 2001, presidents including George W Bush and Barack Obama carried out military strikes in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen, as part of a global “war on terror”.
Both men drew on congressional authorisations for military force (AUMFs) that had been narrowly drafted to respond to the September 11 attacks.
Those authorisations were applied over time to an expanding list of organisations and conflicts.
Critics, however, have argued that this growing use of military force extends presidential authority beyond its constitutional limits and has weakened oversight and transparency.
Trump has continued the trend of presidents deploying the military without Congress’s approval first.
Normally, the power to declare war and authorise military action falls to Congress, not the president, and Congress retains the authority to rein in presidential military deployments.
Many conservative lawmakers, however, have been hesitant to challenge Trump, who maintains a firm hold over the Republican Party. Others accept the administration’s depiction of the air strikes as an anti-narcotics campaign.
Only two Republican senators, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted with Democrats in their recent attempts to stop the boat bombings.
“From the bombing of Iran to possible attacks on Venezuela, there are some entrepreneurial figures on the right willing to criticise the administration when it carries out interventionist policies,” said Curt Mills, the director of the American Conservative magazine, which advocates for a more restrained foreign policy.
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“But Congress is weak. Its influence over foreign policy is at a historical nadir.”
‘There is no limiting principle’
Given the reluctance of most Republican lawmakers to assert congressional authority, some experts expressed hope that voters will send lawmakers to Congress who will exert greater control over military attacks abroad.
But thus far, at least, a majority of voters do not appear to view the current strikes with particular alarm.
In a CBS News poll last month, about 53 percent of respondents expressed approval for the strikes against the alleged drug boats, while 47 percent expressed disapproval.
Ingber, the Yale Law professor, speculated that decades of military action overseas during the war on terror may have primed the public to see the current strikes as normal.
“It’s possible that this is a frog that has already been boiled, and the public has grown to accept the idea of the president using force on his say-so,” said Ingber. “Even, in this case, against suspected criminals for suspected crimes that we don’t even have the death penalty for in this country.”
But if the “war on terror” has helped desensitise the public to the use of military power overseas, legal experts say the current strikes represent a radical new development: the application of wartime powers to criminal activities.
“The president is claiming the power to kill anyone he accuses of a crime, no questions asked,” said Annie Shiel, the US director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC), an advocacy group.
“There is no limiting principle there. And that makes the stakes extremely high for people in the US and around the world.”
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