President Donald Trump has notified Congress that his administration has determined that members of drug cartels are “unlawful combatants” with which the United States is engaged in “non-international armed conflict”, according to US media.

The memo, reported by The Associated Press news agency and The New York Times on Thursday, comes after the US military last month struck three alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean, killing 17 people. Rights observers and war powers scholars have said the attacks appear illegal under US and international law and likened them to extrajudicial killings.

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The memo is the clearest picture yet of how the administration is seeking to justify such attacks and what its approach could portend.

“Although friendly foreign nations have made significant efforts to combat these organizations, suffering significant losses of life, these groups are now transnational and conduct ongoing attacks throughout the Western Hemisphere as organized cartels,” the memo said, as reported by the AP.

“Therefore, the President determined these cartels are non-state armed groups, designated them as terrorist organizations, and determined that their actions constitute an armed attack against the United States,” it added.

The argument is an extension of the Trump administration’s reframing of cartels as “narco-terrorists” who seek to destabilise the US by pushing illegal drugs across its borders and not profit-driven criminal entities.

The memo did not specify the groups in question although the Trump administration has labelled several Latin American cartels “foreign terrorist organizations” and has particularly focused on Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua.

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Under the US Constitution, only Congress has the right to authorise the use of military force or declare war; however, presidents may take unilateral actions in some cases, particularly in matters of the country’s immediate self-defence.

There is currently no authorisation of use of military force from Congress (AUMF) that would even remotely apply to the strikes in the Caribbean.

Because of that, members of Congress have come under increased pressure to assert the legislative branch’s war powers authorities to rein in Trump. Still, several members of Trump’s Republican Party, which holds a majority in both the House of Representatives and Senate, have cheered the attacks.

Other lawmakers have warned of allowing Trump’s actions to go unchecked.

In a post on X after Thursday’s reports on Trump’s memo, Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said: “Every American should be alarmed that Pres Trump has decided he can wage secret wars against anyone he labels an enemy.”

“Drug cartels must be stopped, but declaring war & ordering lethal military force without Congress or public knowledge – nor legal justification – is unacceptable,” he wrote.

On Bluesky, Brian Finucane, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group and former US Department of State lawyer, said there was “so much wrong” with the Trump administration’s legal justification for the strikes in the Caribbean.

He pointed to the claim that Trump had “determined” that drug smuggling constituted an “armed attack” on the US, which appears to underpin the administration’s stance that the strikes did not stray into unconstitutional war.

“‘Baloney’ is the technical legal term for that claim,” he said.