President Trump likened drug cartels to the militant Muslim terrorist groups the U.S. has targeted during the war on terror and vowed to continue military strikes on alleged drug smugglers off the coast of Venezuela.
“These are the worst of the worst,” Mr. Trump said at White House roundtable on Thursday afternoon with law enforcement and administration officials to discuss the Homeland Security Task Forces, which he created to curb threats from drug cartels.
“It should now be clear to the entire world that the cartels are the ISIS of the Western Hemisphere,” Mr. Trump said. “In addition to their monstrous violence, such as cutting off heads, burning enemies alive, and burning innocent people alive today. “
“They maintain vast arsenals of weapons and soldiers, and they use extortion, murder, and kidnapping to exercise political and economic control,” the president continued.
Mr. Trump has designated several cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a label not normally used for drug cartels. Earlier this month, the Trump administration sent a memo to Congress declaring the U.S. is at war with the cartels.
The memo said the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict with designated terrorist organizations.” By declaring it an armed conflict, like with al Qaeda and other Islamist groups since 2001, the U.S. can lawfully kill enemy combatants, detain them indefinitely without trials and prosecute them in military tribunals.
The U.S. military has launched a series of strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats in waters in Latin America and the Pacific, in what critics have decried as an overreach of Mr. Trump’s authority.
At the White House on Thursday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said those strikes will continue.
“The Department of War is not going to degrade or just simply arrest, we’re going to defeat and destroy these terrorist organizations to defend the homeland on behalf of the American people,” he said.
Mr. Hegseth said his message to cartels is “we will treat you like we have treated al-Qaeda. We will find you. We will map your networks. We will hunt you down, and we will kill you.”
Mr. Trump created the Homeland Security Task Forces on Jan. 20, his first day back in office. It is charged with cracking down on drug cartels and human trafficking networks operating on U.S. soil.
Administration officials, including Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel and Mr. Hegseth, offered updates Thursday on the task forces’ operations.
Ms. Bondi said the task forces have taken more than 3,200 violent gang members and drug dealers off the streets and seized 58,000 kilos of cocaine, which she said would fill one and a half swimming pools, and 2,300 kilos of fentanyl powder.
“We’re dismantling the cartels and we are taking the leaders into custody,” Ms. Bondi said.
