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In August, however, the hard-liners began to win out, according to someone with knowledge of the Administration’s internal deliberations. The shift seemed to mark a victory for Rubio. But the change didn’t reflect Rubio’s influence so much as the involvement of a new player in the policy fight: Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff and the head of the White House Homeland Security Council. “Miller sided with Rubio not because of regime change,” the source told me. Rather, it was because Venezuela presented “an outlet for the belief that the President can just kill these guys” as part of an open-ended war on drugs and crime. “Stephen is a lot of the energy behind the bombings,” the source said. “He is owning the Western Hemisphere portfolio: immigration, security issues, and going after the cartels. He convenes working groups almost every day. He’s been very top-down with the Department of Defense about what he wants to see. Hegseth’s team just says ‘yes.’ They don’t push back. Miller got told no for similar stuff in the first term. He doesn’t have people there to say ‘No, this isn’t a good idea’ anymore.”
For Miller, the military strikes help expand the President’s power, while also reinforcing the narrative of Venezuelan immigrants as “alien enemies.” As a former Trump Administration official put it, “this just feels like the militarization of domestic policy. How do you stay in power? You create an ‘other.’ You say that we’re under attack. You create a casus belli. You blame the other for everything. This is happening while you have the deployment of National Guardsmen to cities. You’re getting people used to these kinds of actions. This is expanding the definition of the use of force.”
The implications of Trump’s use of the military, the former White House official said, are not lost on other Latin American countries, either. “If you’re Panama, you think this is about you. If you’re Colombia, you think it’s about you,” he told me. “You prove to the Mexicans that you’ll do what you say. The Brazilians thought this was about them. If you think it’s a signal, it is a signal.”
In Trump’s first term, he asked his advisers whether the U.S. could conduct military strikes against Mexico, based on the premise that the country was principally to blame for America’s drug problems. “They don’t have control of their own country,” Trump told Mark Esper, his previous Secretary of Defense. As Esper later wrote in a memoir, Trump had repeatedly asked if he could “shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs,” and proposed that, if necessary, it could be done “quietly.” “No one would know it was us,” Trump reportedly said.
Trump was ultimately forced to relent after staunch opposition from the Department of Defense: the Mexican government was the U.S.’s largest trade partner and a muscular ally in limiting the spread of regional migration. By the start of 2023, though, the prospect of drastic action was becoming an increasingly mainstream position in the Republican Party. G.O.P. lawmakers in the House introduced, but failed to pass, an authorization for the use of military force against cartels, and they argued that the federal government should designate them as foreign terrorist organizations. Adding Tren de Aragua to this particular cause was a by-product of the 2024 Presidential campaign. In August, after a video from a housing complex in Aurora, Colorado, went viral, showing armed men alleged to belong to the gang, Trump began talking about the group constantly.
Once he was back in office, Trump wanted to see more dramatic military action on the international stage. “There’s been an urge, an energy to do something aggressive and different,” the person with knowledge of the Administration told me. “It had to go somewhere. We were going to start killing cartel members. But there was a feeling that if we started to go kinetic in Mexico then that would have second- and third-order consequences that would be bad.”
The Mexican government, for its part, was being quietly coöperative at the border, and the country’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, was managing to balance public opposition to Trump with greater flexibility in private. Venezuela, by contrast, was an obvious target. “There wasn’t a direct risk because Venezuela isn’t on our border,” the person said. Maduro has viciously attacked political opponents and presided over the country’s economic collapse. During the past decade, nearly eight million people have fled. On October 10th, the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She promptly dedicated it to Trump, whom she’s been trying to enlist for years to oust Maduro. “We all know that the head of Tren de Aragua is Maduro,” Machado told Donald Trump, Jr., on his podcast in February. “The regime has created, promoted, and financed Tren de Aragua.” Under Maduro, she added, the country has become a “refuge for terrorists, drug cartels, and groups like Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and China.”
When the U.S. struck the first Venezuelan boat, in September, one detail immediately caught the attention of former government officials: eleven people were said to have been on board. In drug-running operations, it is highly unusual for so many passengers to be on a single vessel. “There’s almost always three or four: a navigator, a pilot, and a person to put gas in the boat,” Story told me. “There are never eleven people on a drug boat because each person is drugs that you can’t transport.”
It was possible that some men on the boat were involved in trafficking and that others were simply hitching a ride. The boat was intercepted off the northern coast of Venezuela, near a small fishing town called San Juan de Unare, which, in the past two decades, has become a transit point for the smuggling of cocaine and marijuana. One Venezuelan woman told the Times that her husband, a fisherman, left for work and never returned. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, the families of the men killed posted testimonials on social-media accounts. But the Venezuelan government, for reasons that remain unclear, appears to have pressured them to take down their accounts. “This is the problem with the situation,” Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan crime journalist, told me. “Both governments”—the U.S. and Venezuela—“like to lie.”
