President Donald Trump said that the U.S. carried out a strike on a dock facility in Venezuela—the first known U.S. land strike in the country amid the Trump Administration’s pressure campaign on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Trump told reporters on Monday that the U.S. had “hit” a “dock area where they load the boats up with drugs.” 

The U.S. is also continuing its deadly attacks on alleged drug vessels in the region as part of what Trump has called an “armed conflict” with cartels. The news of the dock strike came the same day that U.S. Southern Command, which oversees the country’s military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, announced on X that, at the direction of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the military launched another strike against a boat believed to have been "transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific” and that was allegedly “engaged in narco-trafficking operations.” The military provided no evidence to support that allegation. Two men were killed in the strike.

Here’s what to know about the situation.

The first known U.S. strike inside Venezuela

Trump said on Monday that there was a “major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs.” 

“They load the boats up with drugs. So we hit all the boats, and now we hit the area,” the President said. “It’s the implementation area, that’s where they implement, and that is no longer around.”

Trump had previously said in a Friday radio interview on WABC that the U.S. “knocked out” what he described as “a big plant, or a big facility, where the ships come from” two nights before.

Neither the President nor his Administration has provided any additional information about the strike.

But CNN and the New York Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that the CIA conducted the attack earlier in December on a dock that U.S. officials suspected a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua—which the Trump Administration has designated a foreign terrorist organization—was using to hold drugs. Officials believed that the gang may have been readying to transport those narcotics onto boats, according to the Times. No one was at the facility when the attack took place, per the reports_._

Maduro has not yet publicly commented on the land strike.

Trump ramping up pressure on Maduro

For months, the Trump Administration has been conducting in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean on more than two dozen boats it has . The strikes have sparked controversy among lawmakers and legal experts, many of whom have questioned whether there is a legal justification for such attacks. That controversy amplified after news emerged that the U.S. military conducted a strike on a boat in the Caribbean on Sept. 2, launching a follow-up strike on the boat after an initial hit and killing two survivors.