WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump confirmed the United States carried out a drone strike on a port facility just off the coast of Venezuela last week, marking the first known U.S. attack inside the country.
The strike reportedly targeted a dock where officials believe the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua has been storing drugs and loading them onto boats to be transported into other countries, including the United States. Trump offered few details of the strike, but confirmed to reporters on Monday that the U.S. was responsible.
“There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” he said. “They load the boats up with drugs. So we hit all the boats, and now we hit the area. It’s the implementation area, that’s where they implement.”
There were no casualties from the attack, and officials say no one was present on the port at the time, according to CNN, which first reported the strikes. But it’s the first known U.S.-led attack inside Venezuela, and it could escalate tensions between the two countries amid a growing pressure campaign from Trump against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
Trump initially acknowledged the attack in a radio interview on Friday, during which he said the strikes had taken place two days prior. The initial interview went mostly unnoticed but has since garnered widespread attention.
“We just knocked out — I don’t know if you read or you saw — they have a big plant or big facility where they send the, you know, where the ships come from,” Trump said in the interview. “So we hit them very hard.”
Trump offered little more details, including in his remarks with reporters on Monday, and declined to specify whether the attack was carried out by the CIA or the military. In terms of damage, Trump said “we hit all the boats” and that the port “is no longer around.”
Trump has been increasingly targeting Venezuela over the last few months, and he has approved several drone strikes destroying alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. More than 30 boats have been destroyed so far, all in international waters.
Although Trump has suggested he would escalate his attacks to land, the port strike last week marks the first known attacks on Venezuelan targets carried out by the U.S.
Other top officials in his administration have described those attacks as being similar to targeting terrorists, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth comparing the alleged drug traffickers to al-Qaida.
“These narcoterrorists are the al-Qaida of our hemisphere,” Hegseth said at the Reagan National Defense Forum earlier this month. “And we are hunting them with the same sophistication and precision that we hunted al-Qaida.”