President Trump said Thursday he will inform Congress of his plans to attack land-based cartel targets in Venezuela as he looks to expand his thus-far seaborne military campaign.
“We’re going to go [to Congress]. I don’t see any loss in going — no reason not to,” Trump told reporters at a White House event touting a federal crackdown that’s arrested roughly 3,200 alleged drug cartel members over the past month.
“You know they will always complain, ‘Oh, we should have gone.’ So we’re going to definitely,” Trump said.
The president turned to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, seated to his right, and told him, “I’d like to just tell you, ‘Let’s go.’ We’ll go. We’re going to tell them what we’re going to do, and I think they’re going to probably like it, except for the radical left lunatics.”
Trump has threatened land-based strikes for weeks after the administration on Sept. 2 began targeting vessels smuggling drugs off the Caribbean coast of Venezuela.
“I don’t think we’re going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay? We’re going to kill them, you know, they’re going to be like dead, okay?” Trump said.
Trump said that his campaign against drug cartels, coupled with his summit meeting next Thursday with Chinese President Xi Jinping, would accelerate the decline of overdose deaths in the US, which peaked under former President Joe Biden. --->READ MORE HERE
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| Photo by JONATHAN KLEIN/AFP via Getty Images |
War Secretary Pete Hegseth deploys Gerald R Ford Carrier Strike Group to US Southern Command, Pentagon says
The Trump administration has ordered the deployment of the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group in the Western Hemisphere as the U.S. continues to target suspected drug smuggling vessels in the Caribbean.
"In support of the President’s directive to dismantle Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs) and counter narco-terrorism in defense of the Homeland, the Secretary of War has directed the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group and embarked carrier air wing to the U.S. Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) area of responsibility (AOR)," chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement Friday.
"The enhanced U.S. force presence in the USSOUTHCOM AOR will bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States homeland and our security in the Western Hemisphere," he added. "These forces will enhance and augment existing capabilities to disrupt narcotics trafficking and degrade and dismantle TCOs."
USSOUTHCOM's area of responsibility includes the land mass of Latin America south of Mexico, the waters adjacent to Central and South America and the Caribbean Sea.
The strike group includes the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world's largest aircraft carrier, according to the U.S. Navy, as well as the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers USS Mahan, USS Winston S. Churchill and USS Bainbridge.
The USS Gerald R. Ford is currently deployed to the Mediterranean Sea along with three destroyers. It would likely take several days for the ships to make the journey to South America. In August, the strike group transited the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the English Channel.
The deployment would mean there will be no U.S. aircraft carriers in the Middle East for the first time in years.
The Trump administration has ordered a number of strikes in the Caribbean aimed at dismantling and disrupting drug cartels in the region. --->READ MORE HERE
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