The official line remains the same: The 10-month campaign of strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific has nearly stopped the flow of drugs by sea into the United States. In December, President Trump boasted about a 92 percent drop in seaborne shipments. Last month, in an apparent sign of further progress, he said the decline was up to 97.2 percent.But government officials and agencies closest to the action, at sea and on America’s streets, tell a different story. In hearings, official reports, and interviews they have all but given up the pretense that the campaign has succeeded in reducing the flow of drugs into the U.S., even as 221 people have been killed in more than 60 strikes.General Francis L. Donovan, the head of Southern Command, which runs the military campaign, told lawmakers earlier this year that “the boat strikes aren’t the answer,” though they remain “one of the many tools” in the long-term effort to counter narcotics. As if to prove the point, street prices for cocaine in the United States have plummeted, the opposite of what would be expected if smugglers were being deterred.Last month, Senators Rand Paul, a Republican, and Tim Kaine, a Democrat, pressed Secretary of State Marco Rubio about the three criteria the military uses to target boats. (The Pentagon’s targeting criteria are classified, but some lawmakers on Capitol Hill have reviewed them.) At a committee hearing, the senators focused not on the criteria themselves but on what was missing: any requirement that guns or drugs be on board.“In order to blow them up, we don’t have to say that they’re armed or have drugs, and I think that a lot of people would have questions, which I still do,” Paul said.Rubio told the senators only that the military doesn’t blow up every boat it investigates. “I can tell you they do walk away from strikes,” Rubio said.Trump has made unsupported claims that fentanyl, the drug most responsible for an epidemic of fatal overdoses, is on the targeted boats. That line began to fall apart shortly after the initial killings when top officials acknowledged to lawmakers that the strikes were aimed at cocaine smuggling. A Pentagon inspector-general report published in May confirmed that, saying fentanyl is “produced almost entirely in Mexico” and enters the U.S. through the southern border—not via boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.Boats do carry cocaine, but the drugs on the vessels off the coast of Venezuela are most likely headed not to the United States but to Europe or Africa, Jonathan Caulkins, a drug-policy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, told me.Over 10 months, the White House and Pentagon have maintained that the campaign is vital to securing “our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put it. “The President has leveraged his dealmaking prowess to stop the influx of fentanyl precursors from China and struck narcoterrorist drug boats to stop the flow of drugs by sea,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told me in an emailed statement. “President Trump is using every tool at his disposal to save lives from the scourge of illicit narcotics.”Yet measured against their stated purpose of reducing the flow of narcotics into the United States, the strikes have been a bust. When combined with other policy changes, they may even have set back the Justice Department’s ability to pursue cases against cartel kingpins. And the strikes’ legal justification, which has been shrouded in secrecy, is now being tested in federal court.The campaign grinds on regardless. Since Donovan’s March testimony, he has authorized 21 strikes that have killed 64 people.[Read: Trump’s boat strikes could make the cartel problem worse]The initial strike in September provoked outrage, especially after Hegseth was accused of ordering a follow-up strike on two survivors as they clung to the wreckage. Hegseth denied any impropriety but the furor prompted congressional scrutiny of how and why the military was pursuing the campaign. Subsequent strikes have caused much less of a stir. That may ultimately prove to be the campaign’s most significant impact: to inure the American public to the idea that the U.S. can fire missiles, without presenting evidence, at anyone it claims has a drug connection—a rationale that may soon be used on a much greater scale elsewhere in the region.The Coast Guard for years has been on the front lines of battling suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean. If Coast Guard officers found narcotics on a boat, the smugglers would be brought in for questioning, jailed, and prosecuted in the U.S. Traffickers could be pressured to flip on their higher-ups in exchange for lighter sentences, allowing federal prosecutors to build cases against cartel bosses over time.Boat strikes, by definition, scupper that approach. “By killing the mariners on the delivery boats, we lose any opportunity to exploit them, their boats, and their electronics for more information to tackle trafficking groups,” Thomas Padden, the former acting director of the office for prosecuting international drug trafficking, said in written testimony before a congressional subcommittee in March. (The Department of Justice closed the office Padden led last fall.)But the administration has gone a step further, changing its policy so that suspected low-level smugglers who are caught alive are typically now let go. A Justice Department memo, issued in February 2025, aimed to eliminate the threat of cartels through more aggressive action against cartel honchos. But in pursuit of that goal, the memo said, “it will often be prudent to pursue removal from the United States of a low-level investigative target” rather than incur prosecution costs. The same month, then–Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove gave a preview of how he favored treating low-level operatives instead. He told top drug prosecutors at a Justice Department conference that the U.S. should “just sink the boats” rather than interdict the vessels, NPR reported last fall.[Read: Pete Hegseth is seriously testing Trump’s “no scalps” rule]Since April 1 of last year, the Coast Guard has repatriated 187 suspected smugglers, Commander Steven Roth, a Coast Guard spokesperson, told me in an email. “In previous years, the Coast Guard generally brought such suspects to the U.S. for prosecution,” he noted. In theory, repatriated suspects could be prosecuted in their home country. But Roth told me that the agency “does not track or monitor partner nation prosecutions.” (That count, Roth said, does not include the few who have survived the strikes.)A suspected drug smuggler crossing the Caribbean in a small boat, then, faces two potential fates following detection: being blown out of the water by a missile, or being caught and repatriated by the Coast Guard. In neither case does the smuggler face the U.S. justice system. From the cartels’ perspective, the U.S. government’s new approach means either that a handful of employees and some merchandise is lost but potential turncoats are eliminated, or some merchandise is seized by the Coast Guard and the low-level smugglers are sent home.Natalie Baldassarre, a Justice Department spokesperson, told me in an email statement that “there has been no pause on federal prosecutions of drug smugglers.” The department’s focus, she said, is on eliminating cartels by prosecuting “the most serious, readily provable offenses” for cartel bosses.But Trump undermined one of the highest-profile anti-narcotics convictions of recent years when he pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who faced 45 years in prison for conspiring to import cocaine into the U.S. His was a prime example of a kingpin conviction made possible by the prosecution of lower-level offenders. The pardon was a “betrayal to every agent and prosecutor that worked on the case,” John F. Tobon, a former Homeland Security Investigations official, told me. Trump said in his pardon that Hernández had been “treated very harshly and unfairly.”The price of drugs on America’s streets shows just how ineffective the campaign has been. The special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration Miami Field Division told a local news outlet in May that his agents had found the street cost of cocaine at record lows, which suggests a plentiful supply. Prices were “the lowest I’ve seen during my 22-year career,” he said. In New York, cocaine hasn’t been so cheap since the mid-1990s, a person familiar with local law enforcement’s internal data told me. (The DEA did not respond to a request for comment.)At the same time, the purity of cocaine has risen marginally since September, the month of the first strike, according to data shared with me by the Street Drug Analysis Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. If supply were tightening, researchers would expect to see more impurities in the samples, because dealers would have a greater profit incentive to dilute their product with adulterants, Nabarun Dasgupta, the head of the lab, told me. He’s noticed the opposite: on average, slightly fewer adulterants in the tested samples.The legal backing for the boat strikes may prove even shakier than the campaign’s strategic objectives. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel drafted a secret memo last July to provide justification for the operation. Many legal experts contend that the strikes violate both U.S. and international law by targeting noncombatants who have not been found guilty of a crime. But the Justice Department’s lawyers reportedly argue that cartels are selling drugs to finance violence and extortion, making the boats legitimate targets in an “armed conflict” and the people killed either enemy casualties or collateral damage.Such a secret justification invokes for some former government lawyers a different series of memos written after 9/11. In 2002, Justice Department lawyers created secret legal backing for the use of what the administration called “enhanced interrogation techniques” on terror suspects that, they claimed, didn’t meet the threshold for torture and were therefore permissible. After one of the memos was leaked, prompting outrage, the justification was eventually withdrawn. “The OLC lawyers conjured up a torture memo to justify torture,” Brian Finucane, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group and a former State Department attorney, told me. “And in this administration, they conjured a murder memo to justify murder.”[Read: Fentanyl doesn’t come through the Caribbean]The military’s conduct is also under internal scrutiny. In May, the Defense Department’s inspector general launched an inquiry into whether officials followed standard protocols when conducting the strikes.Meanwhile, the administration’s justification for the strikes is being tested in court. In January, the families of two Trinidadian men killed in an October strike accused the U.S. government of violating “international laws prohibiting extrajudicial killings and federal law prohibiting murder.” The families of 26-year-old Chad Joseph and 41-year-old Rishi Samaroo said in a complaint that the two men were returning home from fishing and farm work in Venezuela when they were killed. Trump claimed that the men were “male narcoterrorists.” The government has filed a motion to dismiss the suit, which was filed in federal court in Massachusetts. “The strikes were ordered consistent with the laws of armed conflict,” Baldassarre, the Justice Department spokesperson, told me in an email. (The Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment on the litigation.)But the campaign, whatever its failures, has succeeded in normalizing the use of military force to combat drugs. Late last year, the White House designated fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction,” language more often applied to nuclear or chemical threats. The designation arguably laid the groundwork for the use of the military to fight cartels that produce the synthetic opioid in Mexico. Such air strikes have long been a red line for the Mexican government, as my colleague Nick Miroff reported in December. But the boat strikes have helped normalize unilateral lethal action in the region under the banner of fighting drugs—so much so that strikes on Mexico’s territory may now appear as the logical next step of an expanding campaign.Other nearby governments already have gotten the message to play ball. Most recently, in Colombia, where President Gustavo Petro has harshly rebuked the boat strikes, a far-right candidate who secured an endorsement from Trump won a tight presidential race. In March, Ecuadorian forces and the U.S. military announced a joint anti-drug-trafficking mission. Last month, the U.S. killed the leader of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, in a strike executed in cooperation with the Trump-friendly government in Caracas. On Wednesday, the State Department designated another drug-trafficking group, the Ecuadorian gang Chone Killers, as a foreign terrorist organization. “What we have learned after decades of effort is that there is not a criminal-justice solution to the cartel problem,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told a gathering of Latin American military leaders at Southern Command headquarters in Florida this spring. “These organizations can only be defeated with military power.”[Read: The boat strikes are just beginning]Collectively, the actions send a message that the United States will not be restricted by laws or norms in pursuit of its foes. The attacks on the boats, and the administration’s promotion of them on social media, have been integral to constructing an image of narco-traffickers as “this new enemy,” Adam Isacson, an expert on Latin American drug trafficking at WOLA, a Washington, D.C.–based NGO, told me. The strikes are largely about “wanting to prove the point that you’re willing to go as far as possible to confront that enemy—unless, of course, they’re the president of Honduras or something.”At the G7 summit last month, after his dubious assertion that seaborne drug trafficking had been all but eliminated, Trump pointed toward his next frontier. “And now we’re going to go and focus on the land,” he said. “They come through Mexico. Mexico has lost control of their country. The cartels run Mexico. And it’s sad.”Nick Miroff contributed to this report.