President Trump addresses the troops. Photo courtesy of the White House via screen grab from YouTube.
In a recent press conference, when asked by a reporter why he didn’t simply deploy the Coast Guard to intercept narco boats and arrest traffickers, President Trump replied, “We’ve been doing that for thirty years, and it has been totally ineffective.”
That answer sums up his policies across the board: stepping up ICE deportations, using the military to fight crime, imposing tariffs to demand better trade deals for the United States, sealing the border, and deploying the military to stop narco traffickers who have been designated as transnational terrorists. His declaration of narco traffickers as invaders attacking the nation is also a first. But being the first doesn’t mean being wrong.
The left criticizes these policies, essentially saying the president should do what previous presidents have done. But those same old approaches never secured the border, never reduced the number of illegal aliens, never stopped the flow of drugs into America, and never got the country better trade deals.
The president went on to say that the narcos “have faster boats…world-class speedboats…but they’re not faster than missiles.”
In August 2025, the Trump administration deployed Navy warships and personnel to the Caribbean, with the first military airstrikes occurring on September 1–2, 2025. The deployment involved approximately 9,000 sailors and Marines aboard several destroyers and cruisers. The Pentagon has since sent the Gerald Ford Carrier Strike Group to the U.S. Southern Command area of responsibility.
As of late October 2025, the U.S. has conducted at least 13 strikes, killing 57 people in the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern Pacific Ocean. The campaign, which began with strikes near Venezuela, has now expanded to include the Eastern Pacific off Colombia. In one September 19 strike, conducted jointly with the Dominican Republic, the Dominican Navy salvaged 377 packages of cocaine totaling about 1,000 kilograms (2,200 lbs) after the boat was destroyed.
Liberals are upset because this is the only publicly documented drug seizure from the strikes. They claim the boats were fishing vessels, which is ironic because one of them was a submarine, and only narcos have submarines. The others were being tracked by the U.S. Navy, an organization with extensive experience distinguishing fishing boats from narco boats.
Still, Democrats remain unhappy. They accuse the president of extrajudicial killings, of killing people for no reason. They are going after Trump with a vehemence they never unleashed on cartel members.
Another criticism of President Trump is his claim that each boat destroyed saves 25,000 American lives, and that destroying five boats saved 100,000 lives. Democrats cite CDC data showing that drug overdoses increased from May 2024 through April of this year, rising from 73,000 to 125,000 deaths. They argue this increase proves Trump’s strikes saved no lives.
The fact is, the fewer drugs that enter the country, the fewer overdoses there will be. Unfortunately, there are still enough drugs in the country to kill 125,000 people. That only proves Trump needs to step up his efforts. Rather than offering an alternative way to stop drugs from entering the country, Democrats are nitpicking the president’s estimate of 25,000 lives.
Ostensibly, Trump meant that the quantity of drugs seized was enough to kill 25,000 people, which isn’t exactly the same as saving 25,000 lives, but in the end, that’s a distraction. The real point is that the U.S. must stop drugs from coming in, and Trump’s actions are reducing the flow.
One of the most entertaining challenges to Trump’s policy comes from media reports that the sister of one of the arcos claimed he was a fisherman, not a trafficker. After doing some research, however, it became apparent that there’s a long history of people guilty of crimes claiming they were innocent. There’s also a long history of next of kin of those killed by the U.S. military insisting their relative was innocent in hopes of getting money. And, of course, there’s a long history of the mainstream media doing everything in their power to make the president look bad.
If the mainstream media cared to fact-check, they would discover that the man’s name is Andrés Fernando Tufiño Chila, and there is a record of someone with the same name, age, and photo who was previously convicted in 2021 of drug smuggling and released from prison in January 2024. In fact, a person with that exact name and age pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court in 2021 to operating a drug smuggling vessel running from Ecuador to Mexico, admitting to carrying more than 2,360 pounds of cocaine. He was sentenced to 60 months in prison and released in January 2024.
The bottom line is that if there are no drugs, there will be no drug overdoses. Decreasing the amount of drugs coming into the country will save lives, even if it’s difficult to quantify how many. Liberals keep pointing out that more Americans die from fentanyl than cocaine, and that fentanyl comes from Mexico, so they argue Trump is targeting the wrong narcos. But with the southern border already secure, the overall amount of drugs coming in is bound to decrease.
All drugs need to be stopped, not only because doing so saves American lives, but because the cartels control the governments of Mexico and Colombia. Breaking the cartels could usher in a new era of prosperity in those countries, which would also reduce the flow of illegal aliens to the United States.
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