Trump ‘Determined’ the U.S. Is Now in a War With Drug Cartels, Congress Is Told

President Trump has decided that the United States is engaged in a formal “armed conflict” with drug cartels his team has labeled terrorist organizations and that suspected smugglers for such groups are “unlawful combatants,” the administration said in a confidential notice to Congress this week.

The notice was sent to several congressional committees and obtained by The New York Times. It adds new detail to the administration’s thinly articulated legal rationale for why three U.S. military strikes the president ordered on boats in the Caribbean Sea last month, killing all 17 people aboard them, should be seen as lawful rather than murder.

Mr. Trump’s move to formally deem his campaign against drug cartels as an active armed conflict means he is cementing his claim to extraordinary wartime powers, legal specialists said. In an armed conflict, as defined by international law, a country can lawfully kill enemy fighters even when they pose no threat, detain them indefinitely without trials and prosecute them in military courts.

Geoffrey S. Corn, a retired judge advocate general lawyer who was formerly the Army’s senior adviser for law-of-war issues, said drug cartels were not engaged in “hostilities” — the standard for when there is an armed conflict for legal purposes — against the United States because selling a dangerous product is different than an armed attack.

Noting that it is illegal for the military to deliberately target civilians who are not directly participating in hostilities — even suspected criminals — Mr. Corn called the president’s move an “abuse” that crossed a major legal line.

The notice to Congress, which was deemed controlled but unclassified information, cites a statute requiring reports to lawmakers about hostilities involving U.S. armed forces. It repeats the administration’s earlier arguments but also goes further with new claims, including portraying the U.S. military’s attacks on boats to be part of a sustained, active conflict rather than isolated acts of claimed self-defense.

Specifically, it says that Mr. Trump has “determined” that cartels engaged in smuggling drugs are “nonstate armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States.” And it cites a term from international law — a “noninternational armed conflict” — that refers to a war with a nonstate actor.