Last September, the U.S. military fired the first of 63 strikes against 67 small fishing boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean. The spate of killings in Operation Southern Spear has claimed 221 lives so far, according to the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization.
In April, President Donald Trump boasted about the effectiveness of his extrajudicial maritime strikes against alleged drug traffickers, claiming his methods had stopped 98.2 percent of all drugs coming into the country by ocean or sea.
However, new evidence from those inside the Trump administration shows the strikes have not slowed the flow of drugs coming into the country. Instead, they’ve forced drug traffickers to “develop new strategies and tactics,” while “undermining traditional investigative methods” used by federal law enforcement, according to The Washington Post.
The president has repeatedly cited the opioid crisis and the rise in fentanyl use as the impetus for his escalation to maritime strikes. Yet most fentanyl is produced in Mexico with chemicals from China, and the boats that were struck were mostly carrying cocaine headed for other countries.
It’s no surprise then that halfway through 2026, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has already seized 1.2 billion doses of fentanyl—roughly the same amount taken by CBP in all of 2025—with 83 percent of it entering the country by land. That tracks with findings from the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment and a report by the Government Accountability Office, which state that the majority of fentanyl entering the U.S. comes through Mexico and over the Southwest border through ports of entry.
Despite these high numbers, fentanyl overdoses and misuse of the drug have been on the decline for several years, a fact that the DEA attributes to China dismantling the production and distribution networks for synthetic opioid precursors within its borders, which in turn has led to a decline in the purity of fentanyl powder.
Since July 2023, there’s been a 50 percent decline in overdose deaths caused by synthetic opioids like fentanyl, with a 19 percent decline in synthetic opioid overdose deaths in the past 12 months, according to the latest available data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At the same time, the number of Americans aged 12 years and older who’ve misused opioids has fallen by roughly 17 percent since 2023, according to the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, an annual report run by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Instead of a deterrent, drug cartels, which mostly use the Caribbean to traffic cocaine, apparently view the U.S. maritime strikes as the cost of doing business. In January, the Defense Department’s Inspector General stated cartels had already “adapted to the challenges imposed” by the operation and shifted to “new shipping routes and modalities” for trafficking.
Of course, any change in distribution channels likely means fewer drug seizures by federal law enforcement patrolling known trafficking corridors. To wit, CBP has seized 50,233 pounds of cocaine so far in FY 2026, a 2.4 percent decline in weight seized year-over-year despite the resources and manpower devoted to the issue. Meanwhile, street prices for cocaine remain relatively steady, according to The New York Times, meaning there’s been no discernible effect on supply.
In fact, selling cocaine at wholesale prices has never been more lucrative. In South Florida, DEA agents are seeing the “lowest drug prices in over a decade” for a kilo of cocaine, according to Local10.com. Notably, most fentanyl users get hooked on the drug inadvertently, so the increase in cocaine trafficking might also lead to a resurgence in opioid use through dealers looking to stretch their inventory by cutting the purity of their drugs with fentanyl.
That’s what has been happening in Arizona, where drug users looking for oxycodone or methamphetamines are instead given powdered fentanyl. The surge in tainted drugs led to a spike in the state’s drug death rate that’s nearly twice the national average, according to The New York Times.
None of this was made better by the Trump administration’s policy of blowing up fishing boats at sea, especially as they’ve provided no evidence the boats actually contained illicit drugs. Worse, Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted in a Senate hearing in June that evidence of narcotics on the boats is not a criterion when the military chooses its target.
The drug boat strikes have neither stopped the flow of illegal drugs nor curbed American appetites for these substances. As long as there’s demand from the 47.5 million Americans who use drugs, there’ll always be an incentive for drug cartels to find new ways to traffic their products.
