Trump threatens to shoot down Venezuelan military aircraft as U.S. military presence around Venezuela grows

On Sept. 2, 2025, U.S. military forces struck a boat in the Caribbean Sea, killing 11 people the administration identified as members of the Tren de Aragua gang. Venezuelan officials called the strike an "extrajudicial killing" and disputed the U.S. account of who was aboard and where the boat was located.

Three days later, on Sept. 5, Trump warned publicly that U.S. commanders could shoot down Venezuelan military aircraft that "put us in a dangerous position." The threat followed a Sept. 4 incident in which the Pentagon said two Venezuelan military jets flew near a U.S. Navy vessel in international waters, calling the overflight "highly provocative."

The U.S. deployed ten F-35 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico and staged more than 4,000 sailors and Marines in the southern Caribbean ahead of the Sept. 2 strike. The task force also included ships armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles and a fast-attack submarine.

On Aug. 7, 2025, the Trump administration raised the reward for the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to $50 million. CNN and other outlets reported Trump had signed a secret directive in July-August 2025 authorizing lethal military strikes against cartel suspects, backed by a classified Justice Department legal opinion justifying the use of force.

The Trump administration formally notified Congress that the United States was in an "armed conflict" with drug cartels — a legal designation with significant implications for the War Powers Resolution, which requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing U.S. forces to hostilities and limits unauthorized deployments to 60 days without congressional authorization.

Legal scholars told Time magazine the Venezuela strikes raised serious questions about whether the administration had the legal authority to conduct offensive military operations without an authorization for use of military force from Congress.

Venezuela's conventional military has approximately 123,000 members. President Maduro claimed to have mobilized 8 million militia members in response to U.S. threats, though analysts assessed that number was inflated for political purposes and that Venezuelan militia units had limited training and equipment. The escalation nonetheless created conditions where a miscalculation by either side could trigger an exchange between U.S. and Venezuelan military forces.

The U.S. strikes continued and expanded after September. The operation, known as Operation Southern Spear, extended to the Eastern Pacific Ocean in October. The administration's framing of cartel counter-narcotics operations as "armed conflict" opened a legal and constitutional debate about the boundaries of executive war-making power that Congress had not authorized.