On September 2, President Donald Trump gleefully announced that he had ordered a "kinetic strike" on a speedboat "transporting illegal narcotics," killing 11 men he described as "positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists." That SEAL Team Six operation became newly controversial a few months later because it included a follow-up missile strike that obliterated two defenseless survivors of the initial attack as they clung to the smoldering wreckage. But even before that revelation, it was clear that the attack marked an alarming escalation of the war on drugs.

The September 2 operation inaugurated a deadly military campaign against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific that so far has killed 115 people in 35 attacks. This new anti-drug strategy treats cocaine couriers as "combatants" who can be killed at will, from a distance and in cold blood, rather than criminal suspects subject to arrest and prosecution. Yet remnants of the latter approach persist, creating contradictions that underline the illogic, immorality, and lawlessness of the murderous methods that Trump prefers.

The U.S. Coast Guard is still intercepting boats suspected of carrying illegal drugs, as it did for decades before Trump deemed that strategy insufficiently violent. Between September 1 and November 30, The New York Times reports, "the Coast Guard interdicted 38 vessels suspected of smuggling drugs." During the same period, the U.S. military blew up 22 suspected drug boats, killing 83 people. The smugglers who were lucky enough to be caught by the Coast Guard met a strikingly different fate: By and large, they were returned to their home countries because the Justice Department declined to prosecute them.

Under U.S. law, the death penalty generally is not available in drug cases. But the Trump administration says cocaine couriers deserve death, delivered without legal authorization or any semblance of due process, because supplying Americans with the drugs they want is tantamount to murder. It also says cocaine couriers are committing crimes so minor that prosecuting them would be a waste of Justice Department resources. That blatant inconsistency exposes the fallacy of drug smuggling with violent aggression.