President Donald Trump has confirmed that two men who survived a military strike on a drug smuggling vessel will be sent to their respective countries.
In an announcement on Saturday, Trump confirmed that the two men on the drug-running vessel will be sent to Ecuador and Colombia to face prosecution for the illegal and nearly fatal drug-running enterprise.
The two men were on board a semi-submersible vessel believed to be transporting fentanyl and other narcotics along a well-known smuggling route toward the United States.
The strike on the vessel marked the sixth strike that the U.S. military has made on suspected drug-running vessels in the Caribbean under the leadership of Trump.
Trump has vowed to crush Central and South American drug cartels both by closing down the southern border, but also by using lethal military force to disrupt the trafficking of deadly drugs that kill countless Americans every year.
For years, drug cartels have had carte blanche to run their deadly cargo through the Caribbean Sea and across the southern border, but those days are over as long as Trump is in the White House.
Trump celebrated the strike in a post on Truth Social saying, "It was my great honor to destroy a very large drug-carrying submarine that was navigating toward the United States on a well-known narcotrafficking transit route. U.S. intelligence confirmed this vessel was loaded up with mostly fentanyl, and other illegal narcotics."
Alongside this post, Trump released the footage of the strike that destroyed the vessel in a similar fashion to the last few strikes on drug smuggling vessels.
For the first time, those participating in smuggling deadly drugs have something to fear. Simply seizing random amounts of smuggled drugs isn't enough to truly deter cartel activity.
Furthermore, Trump has avoided a massive legal headache as he no longer has to worry about detaining prisoners of war who have the legal right to contest their detention in the American court system.
Instead, these smugglers have gone to their respective countries, where their cases will be handled. The cases will likely be open and shut, and those smugglers can expect to spend some time behind bars, which is still better than being dead.
On the home front, Trump is already dealing with growing legal challenges as Democrats have predictably chosen to side with drug-smuggling cartels and launch spurious lawsuits against Trump's use of military force against cartels.
Of course, it's not just Democrats who have an issue with Trump starting a hot war against cartels. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has been a staunch critic of Trump's use of force and claims that the military strikes on drug smuggling vessels are illegal.
It remains to be seen what will happen with these legal challenges, but it's refreshing to see America's trillion-dollar military used to directly defend the homeland instead of waging meaningless wars on the other side of the globe.
