In August, however, hardliners began to win the day, according to a person familiar with the administration's internal deliberations. The shift seemed to mark Rubio's victory. But the change reflects less Rubio's influence and more the entry of a new player in the political fray: Stephen Miller, the president's deputy chief of staff and head of the White House Homeland Security Council. “Miller didn’t side with Rubio because of regime change,” the source told me. Rather, it was because Venezuela provided “an outlet for the belief that the president can just kill these guys” as part of an open-ended war on drugs and crime. “Steven is the driving force behind the explosions,” the source said. “He holds the Western Hemisphere portfolio: immigration, security issues and anti-cartels. He convenes working groups almost every day. He has discussed in great detail with the Department of Defense what he wants to see. Hegseth's team just says yes. They don't push back. Miller was told no in the first semester for things like that. He no longer has people who can say, 'No, this is not a good one.' idea”.
Miller said the military strikes help expand the president's power and also reinforce the idea of Venezuelan immigrants as “enemies.” As a former Trump administration official put it, “It just seems like a militarization of domestic politics. How do you stay in power? You create an 'other'. You say we're under attack. You create a casus belli. You blame everything on the other. This happens while you have National Guardsmen stationed in cities. You condition people to these kinds of actions. It broadens the definition of the use of force.”
The consequences of Trump's use of military force, according to a former White House official, have not gone unnoticed in other Latin American countries. “If you're from Panama, you think it's about you. If you're from Colombia, you think it's about you,” he told me. “You are proving to the Mexicans that you will do what you say. The Brazilians thought it was about them. If you think this is a signal, then this is signal”.
During Trump's first term, he asked his advisers whether the United States could launch military strikes against Mexico, on the assumption that the country was primarily to blame for America's drug problems. “They don’t control their country,” Trump told Mark Esper, his previous defense secretary. As Esper later wrote in his memoir, Trump repeatedly asked if he could “fire missiles into Mexico to destroy drug labs” and suggested that if necessary, it could be done “quietly.” “Nobody will know it was us,” Trump allegedly said.
Trump was ultimately forced to make concessions after staunch opposition from the Department of Defense: the Mexican government was the United States' largest trading partner and a strong ally in limiting the spread of regional migration. By early 2023, however, the prospect of decisive action had become an increasingly popular position within the Republican Party. House GOP lawmakers introduced but failed to pass authorization to use military force against the cartels and argued that the federal government should designate them as foreign terrorist organizations. Tren de Aragua's involvement in this particular case was a by-product of the 2024 presidential campaign. In August, after a video from an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado, went viral showing armed men believed to belong to a gang, Trump began talking about the group regularly.
Once back in power, Trump wanted to see more dramatic military action on the international stage. “There was a desire, an energy to do something aggressive and unusual,” a person familiar with the administration told me. “It had to go somewhere. We were going to start killing cartel members. But there was a feeling that if we started acting kinetically in Mexico, there would be second- and third-order consequences that would be bad.”
The Mexican government, for its part, has quietly cooperated at the border, and the country's president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has managed to balance public opposition to Trump with greater flexibility in private life. Venezuela, by contrast, was an obvious target. “There was no direct risk because Venezuela is not on our border,” the person said. Maduro brutally attacked political opponents and presided over the country's economic collapse. Over the past decade, some eight million people have fled the country. On October 10, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado was awarded Nobel Peace Prize. She immediately dedicated it to Trump, whom she has been trying to convince for many years to overthrow Maduro. “We all know that the head of Tren de Aragua is Maduro,” Machado said Donald Trump Jr. on his podcast in February. “The regime created, promoted and financed Tren de Aragua.” Under Maduro, she added, the country has become “a haven for terrorists, drug cartels and groups such as Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and China.”
When the United States struck the first Venezuelan ship in September, one detail immediately caught the attention of former government officials: There were reportedly eleven people on board. It is very unusual in drug trafficking operations to have so many passengers on one vessel. “It’s almost always three or four: a navigator, a pilot and the person who fills the boat with gas,” Storey told me. “There are never eleven people on a drug ship, because every person is drugs that cannot be transported.”
It is possible that some of the men on the boat were involved in human trafficking, while others were simply hitchhiking. The boat was intercepted off the northern coast of Venezuela, near the small fishing town of San Juan de Unare, which has become a transit point for cocaine and marijuana smuggling over the past two decades. One Venezuelan woman said Time that her husband, a fisherman, went to work and did not return. Immediately after the explosion, families of the victims posted reviews on social networks. But the Venezuelan government, for reasons that remain unclear, appears to have pressured them to close their accounts. “That’s the problem with the situation,” Ronna Riskes, a Venezuelan crime journalist, told me. “Both governments”—the US and Venezuela—“love to lie.”
