CREATORS
October 28, 2025
President
Donald Trump is at it again. The president and his administration are carrying
out indiscriminate executions. Since early September, the United States has
carried out strikes against 10 boats off the coast of South America for alleged
drug trafficking.
The
intermittent strikes on sea-going vessels in international waters have killed
at least 43 people, and in one instance, two men survived, were captured and
repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador.
Trump and
"War" Secretary Pete Hegseth have said the boats were known to be
involved in drug smuggling, insisting they have the authority to carry out the
strikes without authorization from Congress. The men on those boats have not
been indicted; they had no right to legal counsel; no right to face their
accuser; they have not been convicted of a crime in an American court — yet
they have been "executed" for the crime of drug smuggling.
During the
second half of 2020, in the midst of a pandemic and a re-election campaign, the
Trump administration decided to indiscriminately start executing federal
prisoners. After 17 years without carrying out an execution, the federal
government carried out 10 in less than six months.
By the end
of 2020, the federal government had conducted more executions in five months
than any other presidency since the turn of the 20th century and carried out
three more executions during a presidential transition more than any other
administration in the history of the United States.
Maybe it
was a ploy to bolster his tough guy bona fides or a lowbrow pitch to his
"law and order" constituency, but Trump's bloodlust saw no boundary.
Even after the election was decided, he kept on killing,
The
unprecedented executions of 2020 included the first federal execution in 68
years of an offender who was a teenager at the time the crime was committed.
The 2020
executions included the first federal execution in 57 years for a crime
committed in a state that had abolished the death penalty, as well as
executions carried out against the wishes of the victims' families and the
first lame-duck executions in more than a century.
The
executions carried out during a pandemic contributed to a COVID-19 outbreak in
the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Ind. The outbreak infected at
least nine members of federal execution teams, several lawyers and at least one
religious advisor.
The first
Trump administration engineered a reckless flurry of state-sponsored killing —
mocking societal norms and devoid of any act of mercy or decency.
At the
White House last week, Trump said he thinks lawmakers will support his
administration's efforts in the Caribbean. He was asked why then not ask
Congress for a declaration of war, his response: "I don't think we're
going necessarily to ask for a declaration of war. I think we're just going to
kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK. We're going to kill
them. They're going to be, like, dead."
Can
presidents indiscriminately kill? For those on death row, it may not be the
norm to carry out a flurry of executions, but those individuals were convicted
of first-degree murder, and their cases had been reviewed by various appellate
courts.
The drug
strikes are different. Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser for the State
Department, told NPR, "What this boils down to is the president of the
United States asserting a prerogative to kill people based solely on his own
say-so." No arrest, no trial and no conviction.
"Outside
of armed conflict, there is a word for the premeditated killing of people, and
that word is 'murder,'" he said. "And just because the administration
puts together this fig leaf of a legal justification does not legitimize these
premeditated killings in the Caribbean."
Matthew T.
Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book
The Executioner's Toll, 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can
reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino
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