Fox News: "Narcoterrorists on the run"

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Right-wing media praise Trump’s made-up excuses for war against Venezuela

Trump massively inflated threat from Venezuelan “narco-terrorists” smuggling fentanyl into the US

Written by Zachary Pleat

Research contributions from Jane Lee

Published

President Donald Trump and right-wing media have been quick to cite fentanyl interdiction as the supposed justification for the administration’s likely illegal strikes against vessels in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, which they have blamed on so-called “narco-terrorists” tied to the regime of President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. But reporting has shown the Trump administration’s excuses are built on lies — with virtually no fentanyl arriving in the United States via routes currently being targeted by the military in a bombing campaign that has already claimed at least 83 lives.

This isn't the first time Trump and his media allies have used fentanyl as an excuse for his out-of-control policies, as it was used to justify his instigation of a trade war with Mexico and Canada earlier this year. The Trump administration’s military buildup also follows multiple actions that undermine efforts to combat fentanyl trafficking into the U.S.

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  • Reporting based on government data makes clear that Venezuela is not the source of the fentanyl problem America faces

    • The New York Times: Military officials have told Congress “there was no fentanyl on the boats” destroyed by Trump administration military strikes. Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) told the Times that according to briefings from military officials, the Trump administration’s “rationale for the strikes is because fentanyl is killing so many Americans, but these strikes are targeting cocaine.” Jacobs also told HuffPost that Pentagon officials “argued that cocaine is a facilitating drug of fentanyl, but that was not a satisfactory answer for most of us.” Another congressional source told HuffPost: “They’ve not recovered fentanyl in any of these cases. It’s all been cocaine.” [The New York Times, 11/19/25; HuffPost, 11/4/25]
    • The New York Times: Multiple government agencies have found that “Venezuela plays virtually no role in the fentanyl trade.” A September New York Times report explained: “Fentanyl is almost entirely produced in Mexico with chemicals imported from China, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Justice Department and the Congressional Research Service.” It added: “There is no proof that it is manufactured or trafficked from Venezuela or anywhere else in South America.” [The New York Times, 9/3/25]
    • The Atlantic: Coast Guard data shows “Fentanyl Doesn’t Come Through the Caribbean.” A September 26 article in The Atlantic countered the Trump administration’s justification for extrajudicial killings via military strikes against boats off the coast of Venezuela: “Although the United States Coast Guard interdicts staggering quantities of illegal drugs in the Caribbean each year, it does not encounter fentanyl on the high seas. South American cocaine and marijuana account for the overwhelming majority of maritime seizures, according to Coast Guard data, and there isn't a single instance of a fentanyl seizure—let alone ‘bags’ of the drug—in the agency's press releases.” [The Atlantic, 9/26/25]
    • According to the State Department’s March 2025 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report: “The Department of State, in consultation with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and other relevant agencies, has identified Mexico as the only significant source of illicit fentanyl and fentanyl analogues significantly affecting the United States during the preceding calendar year.” [Washington Office on Latin America, 11/5/25]

  • Trump has bombed boats and built up a military presence near Venezuela based on dubious fentanyl-trafficking claims

    • The United States has carried out at least 21 military strikes on alleged drug-smuggling vessels, in which at least 83 people have been killed, in the Caribbean and the Pacific since September 2. Trump and the Department of Defense have claimed the boats carried fentanyl and were being operated by “narcoterrorists.” After the first strike, Trump claimed that the people on the boat were members of Tren de Aragua; the Trump administration has falsely claimed that gang is controlled by Venezuela’s government and invaded the U.S., and has used the gang to justify many unrelated immigration arrests. [CNN, 11/16/25; ABC News, 11/16/25; PolitiFact, 9/3/25; ProPublica, 11/13/25]
    • Trump gave the CIA permission to carry out covert operations in Venezuela and has built up a military presence in the Caribbean. The USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group entered the Caribbean recently. According to Military.com, more than 2,000 Marines are also stationed nearby on amphibious landing ships, and altogether it “marks the heaviest U.S. naval concentration in the Caribbean since the Cold War era.” [BBC, 10/16/25; Military.com, 11/20/25]

  • Right-wing media suggested these military strikes are necessary to stop fentanyl from being moved into the U.S.

    • Eric Trump on Fox News: “Now every single time a boat goes out of Venezuela, it's get blown up into a million pieces. ... I personally have four friends that have lost children to fentanyl.” [Fox News, The Story with Martha MacCallum, 10/15/25]
    • On Fox, former acting Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Derek Maltz called fentanyl “a weapon of mass destruction” and said he’s “very thankful” for the Trump administration's “aggressive” approach in destroying boats off the Venezuela coast. He also claimed that “of course it's fair game” to attack cartels on land because “we’re at war.” [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 10/24/25]
    • Former deputy national security adviser KT McFarland praised Trump’s “gunboat diplomacy” on Fox to target “the drug cartels that are poisoning Americans with fentanyl.” She said: “It’s all part of a bigger plan that President Trump has, which is to go after the drug cartels that are poisoning Americans with fentanyl and with the gun trafficking and the gang bangers and ruining our security in our cities.” Fox News host Brian Kilmeade added, “And we’d love to kick China, Russia, and Iran right out of Venezuela and right out of our hemisphere. And that could happen in one swoop.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 8/21/25]
    • McFarland on Fox Business justified Trump's military strikes on boats near Venezuela to “stop the drug trade, stop the fentanyl into the United States.” McFarland also criticized members of Congress “complaining he has no right to bomb these cartel boats out of the water, the fentanyl.” She added: “They should be applauding President Trump's actions in stopping the fentanyl trade.” [Fox Business, Mornings with Maria, 11/24/25]
    • Fox News host Jesse Watters claimed that Democrats didn’t criticize former Presidents Barack Obama or Joe Biden for airstrikes carried out during their administrations, but “Trump sinks a boat full of narcos with enough fentanyl to kill a small city and they want to bring him to the Hague.” He added: “That speedboat was full of killers heading to our coast. That’s an enemy attack. Trump neutralized it.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 9/3/25]
    • Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones: “It’s clear that hundreds of thousands of people dying a year of fentanyl, most of it coming out of Venezuela.” Jones added: “Trump is doing what he must do, taking out these drug boats. ... He's doing the right thing moving to topple Maduro, the communist dictator.” [Real America’s Voice, War Room, 10/27/25]
    • Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt: “Pete Hegseth said about what we’re looking at now — every boat that we strike is 25,000 American lives that have been saved. We are talking about … fentanyl pills. We’re talking about fentanyl powder.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 10/24/25]
    • Fox host Laura Ingraham: “Hitting narco terrorists before they traffic their deadly drugs into the United States — good.” Ingraham continued: “Now President Trump has them looking over their shoulders, over the horizon, and up in the sky because for once, they're running scared. No more free passes into the U.S., using boats to smuggle fentanyl and other deadly junk into our country. So now instead of open waters, it's open season on the cartels. At least five drug boats off the coast of Venezuela have been blown out of the water in recent weeks. But hell won't just rain down on them in open waters.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 10/16/25]
    • Fox host and former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended the legality of Trump’s boat strikes: “I want to bring up another count, it’s one we just showed in the intro: It’s the 400,000 Americans who have died of fentanyl. Four-hundred thousand daughters, sons, brothers, sisters not here because [of] an attack — I’m willing to call it an attack on the United States — drug smuggling across our border and over our seas.” [Fox News, Outnumbered, 9/5/25]
    • Fox senior strategic analyst Jack Keane on the military sinking boats: “I really applaud the administration for getting after this. … This is a focus on Venezuela where the Maduro regime, President Maduro, draws significant revenue from this narco trafficking that’s taking place. And they move this narco drugs, in this case fentanyl and other drugs like it. … And this is an attempt to stop that seaborne traffic and just completely shut it down.” [Fox News, The Story with Martha MacCallum, 9/4/25]
    • Fox host Sean Hannity: “Yesterday, President Trump, he took decisive action to keep Americans safe from the vile scourge of fentanyl. He blew up a boat filled with drugs that were coming from Venezuela. He took 11 narco terrorists with it.” [Fox News, Hannity, 9/3/25]
    • Fox host Griff Jenkins explaining the military build-up in the Caribbean: “Remember, the first Trump administration in 2020 indicted Maduro … because Maduro has been for many years the head of the Cartel de los Soles which is responsible for so much cocaine and fentanyl trafficking.” Co-host Lawrence Jones added: “I think at its core, the issue is the American people that are dying because of the fentanyl that have come across the border.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 9/2/25]

  • The Trump administration has also taken many actions to undermine any fight against fentanyl

    • The Trump administration has repeatedly slashed the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which provides grants to programs to reduce fentanyl deaths. A March STAT opinion piece titled “Trump administration says it wants to fight fentanyl, but it’s slashing budget to fight opioid overdoses” called out the administration for firing hundreds of SAMHSA staffers and closing offices. During the government shutdown, NPR reported that the Trump administration fired approximately 125 more staffers from the agency. [STAT, 3/27/25; NPR, 10/11/25]
    • The Trump administration’s focus on mass deportation has taken federal agents away from stopping fentanyl smuggling. In a January interview with The New Republic’s Greg Sargent, former senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official Deborah Fleischaker explained that “all of these other federal law enforcement agencies have now been given immigration enforcement powers and are being told to do immigration enforcement.” She mentioned that ICE Homeland Security Investigations personnel are being taken away from “fentanyl work,” and noted that this also applies to “DEA and ATF and FBI” agents: “All of those functions are going to be impacted because they’re working on immigration enforcement as opposed to their core functions.” [The New Republic, 1/28/25]
    • Trump emptied border checkpoints along fentanyl-smuggling routes for his mass deportation agenda. The Wall Street Journal reported: “The president’s campaign to deport immigrants in the U.S. illegally has taken federal agents away from drug-traffic interdiction. In Arizona, two Customs and Border Protection checkpoints along a main fentanyl-smuggling corridor from Mexico have been left unstaffed. Officers stationed there were sent to process detained migrants.” [The Wall Street Journal, 9/16/25]
    • The Trump administration redirected prosecutors with the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force to “provide focused resources and attention to immigration-related prosecutions.” According to a Department of Justice memo posted by American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the administration further directed assistant U.S. attorneys attached to these drug enforcement task forces “to devote significant time and attention to the investigation and prosecution of” immigration-related offenses instead of drug crimes. Reichlin-Melnick commented that “Trump is literally letting fentanyl traffickers off the hook.” [Twitter/X, 2/2/25]
    • According to Reuters, Trump’s freeze on foreign aid “temporarily stopped U.S.-funded anti-narcotics programs in Mexico that for years have been working to curb the flow” of fentanyl into the U.S. This freeze halted all of the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement programs in Mexico, which “include training Mexican authorities to find and destroy clandestine fentanyl labs and to stop precursor chemicals needed to manufacture the illicit drug from entering Mexico.” Former State Department official Dafna H. Rand told Reuters: “By pausing this assistance, the United States undercuts its own ability to manage a crisis affecting millions of Americans.” [Reuters, 2/13/25]
    • Reuters: Trump’s foreign aid freeze also stalled a U.N. program to stop Mexican cartels from obtaining fentanyl chemicals through Mexican ports. Reuters reported that “the initiative provided Mexico’s Navy with training and equipment to improve screening of cargo entering and exiting the Port of Manzanillo, the nation’s busiest container port. Two additional Mexican seaports — Lázaro Cárdenas and Veracruz — were to be added this month, a rollout that’s now on hold due to the funding cutoff.” Reuters added: “The U.S. funding freeze has also shelved, for now, future training and equipment donations at Manzanillo, four of the sources said. The port was slated to receive additional cargo scanners and drug-testing equipment, two sources said.” [Reuters, 2/24/25]
    • Trump redeployed hundreds of California National Guard servicemembers who had been interdicting fentanyl shipments. A June 25 press release from California Gov. Gavin Newsom stated: “An estimated 32% of CalGuard’s servicemembers dedicated to the state’s Counterdrug Task Force have been reassigned by President Trump to militarize Los Angeles. Typically, under the Governor’s command, nearly 450 servicemembers are deployed statewide, including at ports of entry, to combat transnational criminal organizations and seize illegal narcotics.” According to the press release, “since they started drug interdiction efforts in 2021, they have helped seize nearly 31,000 pounds of fentanyl and more than 50 million pills containing fentanyl, with a street value of more than $450 million.” [State of California, 6/25/25]