President Trump speaks to reporters after arriving aboard Air Force One, Friday, at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Mark Schiefelbein/AP
Hide caption
Toggle caption
Mark Schiefelbein/AP
Washington – US President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that the survivors of a US military strike that targeted a ship suspected of carrying drugs in the Caribbean Sea will be sent to Ecuador and Colombia, their countries of origin.
The army rescued the two after it struck a submerged ship on Thursday, in what was at least the sixth such attack since early September.
“It was a great honor for me to destroy a very large drug-carrying submarine that was sailing toward the United States on a known drug trafficking transit route,” Trump said in a social media post. “US intelligence has confirmed that this vessel was loaded mostly with fentanyl and other illicit drugs.”
The Republican president said two people on board the plane had died — one more than previously reported — and the two who survived would be sent to their home countries “for detention and trial.”
The return process avoids asking the Trump administration questions about the legal status of the two in the American judicial system.
With Trump confirming on his Social Truth platform the death toll, this means that US military action against ships in the area has resulted in at least 29 deaths.
The president justified the strikes by asserting that the United States was engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels. It relies on the same legal authority that the George W. Bush administration used when it declared a war on terrorism after the September 11 attacks, and treats suspected traffickers as if they were enemy soldiers in a conventional war.