The notice, obtained by The New York Times, provides the clearest articulation yet of the administration’s justification for three U.S. military strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea last month that killed 17 people. Trump’s team argues that these killings were lawful acts of war rather than extrajudicial executions, as critics have charged.

By framing the anti-cartel campaign as an active armed conflict, the president is asserting extraordinary wartime powers that allow the U.S. military to target, detain, and try individuals without adhering to the normal standards of civilian law enforcement. Under international law, combatants in an armed conflict can be lawfully killed even if they do not pose an immediate threat, a drastic departure from how criminal suspects are usually treated.

Legal scholars have swiftly challenged this interpretation. Geoffrey S. Corn, a retired Army lawyer who specialized in law-of-war issues, criticized the move as a flagrant abuse of legal norms. He noted that while drug cartels profit from illegal and harmful activities, they are not engaged in the kind of hostilities against the U.S. that would constitute armed conflict. Calling the policy “shredding” the legal framework, he warned that treating criminal groups as enemy combatants undermines fundamental rules meant to protect civilians.

The White House, however, defended Trump’s decision. Spokeswoman Anna Kelly said the president acted “in line with the law of armed conflict” to protect the United States from deadly narcotics, framing the strikes as part of his broader promise to dismantle cartel networks. The administration points to the tens of thousands of American deaths from overdoses each year as evidence of a national security threat that justifies wartime measures.

Still, critics argue the administration’s legal and factual claims are inconsistent. Most of the military operations have targeted Venezuelan vessels, while the surge in U.S. overdose deaths has been driven primarily by fentanyl trafficked from Mexico. Specialists in drug enforcement and armed-conflict law question whether drug smuggling can credibly be defined as an armed attack on the United States.

The confidential notice cites laws requiring Congress to be informed of U.S. involvement in hostilities, suggesting that Trump views the boat strikes not as isolated acts of self-defense but as part of a broader, ongoing conflict. It asserts that cartels are “nonstate armed groups” and that their actions amount to armed attacks, making the U.S. conflict with them a “noninternational armed conflict” under international law.

That legal designation, which historically referred to civil wars within a single country, was controversially applied after the September 11 attacks to justify wartime powers against Al Qaeda. The Supreme Court eventually upheld that reasoning but did so on the basis that Al Qaeda had directly attacked the United States, and Congress had authorized force against it. No such congressional authorization exists in this case.

Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, accused Trump of unilaterally waging secret wars. Reed said the president has offered no credible evidence or justification for the strikes and warned that labeling vaguely defined suspects as unlawful combatants dangerously blurs the line between crime and war. “Drug cartels are despicable and must be dealt with by law enforcement,” Reed said, “but the president has turned them into undefined enemies for military targeting without Congress or the public being fully informed.”

The Defense Department, for its part, insists its operations are lawful. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the mission is being conducted in compliance with both domestic and international law. He added that required notifications have been provided to lawmakers, even as critics accuse the administration of hiding the scope of the campaign.

Some legal experts remain deeply skeptical. Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer, said that for the United States to be in a noninternational armed conflict with a group, that group must qualify as an organized armed force. He questioned whether gangs like Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, which intelligence assessments describe as loosely organized and decentralized, meet that threshold. If they do not, he argued, then the U.S. claim of an armed conflict collapses.

The debate highlights the stakes of Trump’s decision to invoke wartime powers against criminal cartels. Supporters argue the military is finally confronting a deadly threat that law enforcement has failed to contain, while critics see a dangerous precedent that could justify killing suspected criminals without trial. The question now is whether Congress, the courts, or the public will challenge this dramatic expansion of presidential authority.