JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
For more than two months now, the Trump administration has been blowing up suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean. The goal, they say, is to stop the flow of illicit drugs into the U.S., but these military strikes are a huge change from what the U.S. had done for decades, which was intercepting such boats at sea, seizing the drugs and prosecuting the crew. NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas is here in the studio with exclusive reporting on this change and what it means. Hi.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Hi there.
SUMMERS: So, Ryan, you've got a story out today about these deadly strikes on suspected drug boats. And I read it earlier, and it starts with you taking readers behind closed doors to this Justice Department meeting in February. Tell us what happened.
LUCAS: Right. There was a conference in South Carolina for the Justice Department's top transnational crime and drug prosecutors, including the people who focus on maritime interdiction, so stopping drug shipments at sea. And what those interdictions traditionally look like is the Coast Guard will intercept a boat, seize the drugs, bring the crew to the U.S. to face prosecution. Well, at this conference, the then-acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, told prosecutors that the Trump administration wasn't interested in doing those interdictions anymore. And then he said that the U.S. should, quote, "just sink the boats." That's according to three people who were in the audience. They all spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
One of them said jaws dropped when Bove said this. They said they understood Bove to mean that the U.S. was just going to blow the boats up, kill the people on board. Two other attendees said that it wasn't clear to them at the time what Bove meant, in part because it just seemed an outlandish idea. But looking back on it now, they view it differently. One of them said, in retrospect, it seems Bove really did mean to just sink the boats with the people on them.
SUMMERS: Now, Ryan, this happened back in February, which was six months before the Trump administration began blowing up suspected drug boats, right?
LUCAS: That's correct. We knew in February that the administration wanted to go after drug cartels, but nobody was talking publicly back then about military strikes like we've seen in the past few months. And that's why Bove's comments here are so striking. They certainly suggest that there were discussions among top administration officials very early on about the deadly strikes that have now become the norm. Now, Bove left the Justice Department after being confirmed as a federal appeals court judge in late July. I reached out to him for this story, and through a court representative he declined to comment.
SUMMERS: OK. Now, you spoke to a number of current and former officials about the Trump administration's shift to do these deadly strikes. What did they have to say?
LUCAS: Right. So I spoke with nine current and former officials for this story. They are all people who spent much of their careers focused on transnational criminal organizations and drug trafficking, so they have a lot of experience. They are not fans of drug cartels. They all question the legality of the Trump administration's military strikes. Many of them refer to the strikes as murder, and they point out that there's no due process here for the folks who are being killed. Now, the Trump administration, for its part, disagrees. It says these strikes are lawful and that the president is acting under his Article 2 powers as commander-in-chief and in self-defense. The Justice Department said in a statement that the administration is committed to ending drug trafficking and said that these leaks are from disgruntled employees.
Now, there's also a firm belief, I have to say, among the people who I spoke with that the new Trump administration policy is not going to be any more effective than interdicting the boats has been, and this new policy may actually be counterproductive.
SUMMERS: Counterproductive, how?
LUCAS: So the current and former officials I spoke with said that interdictions are crucial to gaining information about drug cartels. One former FBI official told me they used to call it a self-licking ice cream cone. And what he meant by that is the U.S. stops a boat, seizes the drugs, arrests the crew, then uses the leverage of potential prison time in the U.S. to get a crew member to cooperate. That cooperator gives information that helps the U.S. intercept more drug boats, get more informants and learn more about the cartels and their operations. As one former senior Justice Department official told me, if the U.S. is killing all of these people on the boats, you can't talk to them. So over time, the U.S. government's intelligence on the cartels, on their operations, is going to run dry, and that's going to make it harder to fight these drug cartels.
SUMMERS: NPR's Ryan Lucas, thanks for your reporting.
LUCAS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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