Trump is using U.S. sanction power to punish those who prosecute people Trump likes politically. This isn’t an act of justice, but an act of defending those who try to coup democracies. He did something similar when he pardoned the January 6th attackers who tried to end U.S. democracy.
“The U.S. announced new sanctions on the wife of Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes on Monday, the latest move in the Trump administration’s effort to object to the prosecution of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
The Trump administration has repeatedly targeted de Moraes for overseeing the prosecution of Bolsonaro, who was convicted of organizing a coup to remain in office following his electoral loss to now-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2022. A panel of Supreme Court justices, including de Moraes, voted earlier this month to sentence the far-right populist leader, an ally of Trump’s, to a 27-year prison sentence.
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The Brazilian government called the move “a new attempt of undue interference in Brazilian internal affairs,” accusing the U.S. government of pursuing “the politicization and distortion” of the Magnitsky Act.
“This new attack on Brazilian sovereignty will not achieve its goal of benefiting those who led the failed coup attempt, some of whom have already been convicted by the Supreme Federal Court. Brazil will not bow to this latest aggression,” Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.”
Trump’s H1b Visa 100k fee will increase the cost of doing business in America, which means a smaller economy and less jobs. It also incentivizes companies to offshore labor rather than use people in the U.S. who spend some of their salaries in-country.
“Although Trump frames his unprecedented use of the U.S. military to summarily execute drug suspects as “self-defense,” it plainly does not fit that description. By his own account, he has unilaterally decided to impose the death penalty on alleged drug traffickers for the sake of deterrence. That policy represents a stark departure from both military norms and criminal justice principles.
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The Trump administration “has not even seriously tried to present a legal argument to justify the premeditated killing of the people aboard these two vessels,” former State Department lawyer Brian Finucane told The New York Times. “The U.S. president does not have a license to kill suspected drug smugglers on that basis alone.”
Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, who served as the Navy’s top judge advocate general from 2000 to 2002, concurred. “Trump is normalizing what I consider to be an unlawful strike,” he said.
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Trump does not claim the men whose deaths he ordered were engaged in literal attacks on the United States. The justification in both cases was that the targets were “transporting illegal narcotics,” which Trump dubiously equates with violent aggression.”
China is modernizing their military, including their nuclear weapons. Their military is getting very high tech very quickly. China is no longer just copying other people’s technology.
“By the sources’ telling, SEAL Team Six had sailed to the North Korean coast in two mini-submarines under a communications blackout, which meant that they lacked the livestreamed intelligence they were used to having. Based on aerial surveillance beforehand, the military planners had concluded that this part of North Korea was supposed to be free of boat traffic at that hour of the night in the winter.
Some of the SEALs swam to shore while others stayed in the submarines. When a leader of the shore team saw flashlights coming from a boat and a man jumping into the water, he opened fire without any discussion. Then the shore team swam to dispose of the bodies—trying to sink them so that they couldn’t be found—and then they sent a distress signal to evacuate. There were no weapons or uniforms on the boat.
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The mission was carried out during the first Trump administration. The U.S. government wanted insight into North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his high-stakes nuclear negotiations with President Donald Trump.”
“The New York Times, citing unnamed “American officials familiar with the matter,” reported that the boat “appeared to have turned around before the attack started because the people onboard had apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking it.” That detail further complicates the already dubious legal and moral rationales for this unprecedented use of the U.S. military to kill criminal suspects.
The attack “crossed a fundamental line the Department of Defense has been resolutely committed to upholding for many decades—namely, that (except in rare and extreme circumstances not present here) the military must not use lethal force against civilians, even if they are alleged, or even known, to be violating the law,” Georgetown law professor Marty Lederman notes in a Just Security essay. Lederman adds that the September 2 drone strike “appears to have violated” the executive order prohibiting assassination and arguably qualifies as murder under federal law and the Uniform Code of Criminal Justice.
New York University law professor Ryan Goodman, a former Defense Department lawyer, agrees. “It’s difficult to imagine how any lawyers inside the Pentagon could have arrived at a conclusion that this was legal,” he told the Times last week, “rather than the very definition of murder under international law rules that the Defense Department has long accepted.”
As Trump told it, the attack was justified because Tren de Aragua is “a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of [Venezuelan President] Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western Hemisphere.” He said the strike was meant to “serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America.”
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U.S. forces therefore “struck a vessel” that “was assessed to be affiliated with a designated terrorist organization and to be engaged in illicit drug trafficking activities,” Trump explained. “I directed these actions consistent with my responsibility to protect Americans and United States interests abroad and in furtherance of United States national security and foreign policy interests, pursuant to my constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive to conduct United States foreign relations.”
Trump says the men whose deaths he ordered were “assessed” to be affiliated with Tren de Aragua. They also were “assessed” to be engaged in drug trafficking. Without knowing the basis for those assessments, we cannot say how accurate they were. Last week, Trump joked about the potential for deadly errors: “I think anybody that saw that is going to say, ‘I’ll take a pass.’ I don’t even know about fishermen. They may say, ‘I’m not getting on the boat. I’m not going to take a chance.'” Conveniently for Trump, summary execution avoids any need to present evidence, let alone meet the requirements of due process.
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Trump’s justification for that shortcut is perverse. Although he describes the strike as an act of “self-defense,” he does not claim the alleged drug traffickers were engaged in a literal attack on the United States. To accept Trump’s framing, you have to accept the premise that transporting illegal drugs is tantamount to violent aggression. Although that would be consistent with Trump’s often expressed desire to kill drug dealers, it is not consistent with the way drug laws are ordinarily enforced.
In the absence of violent resistance, a police officer who decided to shoot a drug suspect dead rather than take him into custody would be guilty of murder. Morally speaking, this situation is no different. That much is clear even without considering the fundamental injustice of criminalizing conduct that violates no one’s rights, such as the exchange of drugs for money.
Tren de Aragua’s designation as a “terrorist organization” does not affect this analysis. Trump administration officials “admit they could have interdicted the boat and detained the people on board,” notes George Mason law professor Ilya Somin. “They did not pose any imminent threat of violence, and they were not combatants in any war against the US. Calling them ‘narco-terrorists’ does not change these obvious facts.”
As Reason’s Matthew Petti observes, the unprovoked attack on a boat allegedly carrying drugs “shows how ‘terrorism’ makes everyone killable.” But that rhetorical license to kill does not amount to a legal justification.
“The State Department designation merely triggers the government’s ability to implement asset controls and other economic sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and other statutes,” Lederman notes. “It has nothing to do with authorizing [the Defense Department] to engage in targeted killings…which is why the U.S. military doesn’t go around killing members of all designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations.”
Nor can Trump cite any other statute that transforms murder into self-defense in this context. Instead, he is relying on his “constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive” to use deadly force against civilians he perceives as a threat to “national security and foreign policy interests.”
That logic could be extended beyond drug trafficking. Since Trump frequently describes illegal immigration as an “invasion,” might he decide he has the authority to order the summary execution of people trying to enter the country without permission?”
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even if you accept the specious equation of drug smuggling with armed aggression, it seems relevant that the alleged Tren de Aragua drug boat reportedly was turning back when the drone strike was launched. “If someone is retreating, where’s the ‘imminent threat’ then?” Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, formerly the top judge advocate general for the Navy, asked in an interview with The New York Times. “Where’s the ‘self-defense’? They are gone if they ever existed—which I don’t think they did.”
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Geoffrey Corn, formerly the Army’s chief adviser on the law of war, likewise does not buy the “self-defense” argument. “I think it’s a terrible precedent,” he told the Times. “We’ve crossed a line here.””
Trump has pressured South Korea to invest more in the U.S.. South Korea was setting up a factory in Georgia and brought some of their own people to set it up because they have the experience in building that exact type of factory. The U.S. then does a military style raid to remove these people. The administration is either so incompetent that it can’t stop itself from working at cross purposes, or/and U.S. immigration law is so bad that we can’t even get the needed workers legally in to do a job that is a part of a priority set by the president of the United States.