Pentagon Admits It Has No Idea Who’s on “Drug Boats” Being Bombed

The Trump administration has admitted that they are not trying to identify anyone aboard boats they accuse of sending drugs to the U.S. before bombing the vessels. 

Speaking to CNN Thursday, Democratic Representative Sara Jacobs said she was told in a Pentagon briefing “that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessel to do the strikes” and that was part of the reason why the administration has not sought to detain or prosecute the survivors of the strikes, “because they could not satisfy the evidentiary burden.”

As far as the legal justification the White House is using to blow up boats in the waters surrounding Latin America, that information has only been available to select Republicans.

“There’s nothing that we heard in there that changes my assessment that this is completely illegal, that it is unlawful and even if Congress authorized it, it would still be illegal because there are extrajudicial killings where we have no evidence,” Jacobs said, adding that she was told that the only drug targeted in the strikes so far was cocaine, which Pentagon officials called “a facilitating drug of fentanyl.” 

The U.S. has killed at least 61 people in more than a dozen airstrikes on boats in the western hemisphere that it claims are smuggling drugs and are part of “designated terrorist organizations.” The attacks have prompted criticism from countries in the region, including Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico, and several of the people killed in the strikes have been identified as fishermen.  

Even some Republicans in Congress, such as Representative Mike Turner and Senator Rand Paul, have expressed misgivings about the strikes, with Paul calling them “extrajudicial killings.” Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth seem to be planning to go even further, with the president bragging that he wants to begin strikes on land and Hegseth moving 14 percent of the U.S. Navy fleet to the Caribbean Sea. It seems that a war has been declared in all but name. 

Vice President JD Vance appears to think that his wife is going to hell.

At a Turning Point USA town hall Wednesday at the University of Mississippi, in honor of the late right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk, Vance was questioned about the contradictions between his public statements on race, immigration, and religion, and his personal relationship with his Hindu, Indian American wife, Usha Vance. “You are married to a woman who is not Christian.… She still calls herself Hindu. You are raising three kids in interracial, cultural, racial religious household. How are you maintaining, how are you teaching your kids not to keep your religion ahead of their mother’s religion?” a young South Asian woman asked Vance.

“Yes, my wife did not grow up Christian, I think it’s fair to say that she grew up in a Hindu family, but not a particularly religious family in either direction,” Vance replied, before stating that the two were both “agnostic or an atheist” when they met. “Everybody has to come to their own arrangement here. The way that we’ve come to our arrangement is she’s my best friend and we talk to each other about this stuff. So we decided to raise our kids Christian.… That’s the way that we have come to our arrangement.”

The crowd erupted with applause.

“You just gotta talk to the person that God has put you with,” Vance continued, as his answer became more strange. “Most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church. As I’ve told her, and I’ve said publicly, and I’ll say now in front of 10,000 of my closest friends: Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved in by church? Yeah, I do wish that. Because I believe in the Christian gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.”

Many rightfully saw this as Vance rejecting his wife’s own religion and culture.

“Watch as Vance denies his wife’s religious identity as Hindu. Instead, he labels her as currently without a religion and a future Christian,” South Asian history professor Dr. Audrey Trushcke wrote on X. “Folks, believe the far-right when they say Christian is the only legitimate religious identity. They mean it.”

“When JD Vance had hit his lowest, it was his ‘Hindu’ wife and her Hindu upbringing that had helped him navigate through the tough times,” Indian author Monica Verma wrote. “Today in a position of power, her religion has become a liability. What a fall. What an epic fall for the man.”

For the record, Usha Vance has described her Hindu upbringing as something that helped make her parents “good people.”

“I did grow up in a religious household, my parents are Hindu, and I think that was one of the things that made them such good parents, that make them really very good people,” she said in an interview with Fox News last year.

“When you convert to Catholicism it comes with several important obligations, like to raise your child in the faith and all that,” she said in a more recent interview with Meghan McCain. “We had to have a lot of real conversations about how do you do that, when I’m not Catholic, and I’m not intending to convert or anything like that.… The kids know that I’m not Catholic, and they have plenty of access to the Hindu tradition from books that we give them, to things that we show them, to the recent trip to India, and some of the religious elements of that visit.”

This “arrangement” does not sound like a compromise, especially when Usha’s husband is proudly proclaiming that he hopes she’ll abandon the religion she grew up with.

Vance also faced questions by the same woman about his vehemently anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric.

“You sold us a dream. You don’t owe us anything, we have worked hard for it. Then how can you as a vice president stand there and say that we have too many [immigrants] now, and we are going to take them out?”

“I’m talking about people who came in in violation of the laws of the United States of America, and I’m talking about, in the future, reducing the number [of immigrants].”

“You just said you are not stopping with the people who came here legally, right?” the woman replied. “But you are pushing out policies that hurt us. And these policies are not even solving the problems. These problems are just creating chaos.”

“I can believe that the United States should lower its levels of immigration in the future, while also respecting that there are people who have come here through lawful immigration patterns that have contributed to the country,” Vance said. “Just because one person or 10 people or 100 people came in legally and contributed to the United States of America, does that mean we are thereby committed to let in a million, or 10 million, or 100 million? … My job is not to look out for the interests of the whole world. It’s to look out for the people of the United States.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson admitted Thursday that feeding the hungry would mess up his political game.

CNN host Dana Bash asked Johnson why he wouldn’t consider moving money around to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which will stop receiving federal funds at the start of November. The House speaker accidentally revealed Republicans are using the program as leverage to end the government shutdown.

“Because if you deviate from the goal of reopening the entire government, Chuck Schumer and the radicals over there will continue to play games with people’s paychecks, their livelihoods,” Johnson said. “And if you do just part of this, it will reduce pressure for them to do all of it, to do their basic job, and that is reopen the government.”

It seems clear that Democrats aren’t the ones playing games with people’s livelihoods, but instead it is Republicans who are holding SNAP benefits hostage from 42 million Americans in order to make the opposition bend. And SNAP is a hostage Republicans are more than willing to kill—they’ve already voted to gut nearly $300 billion from the program through 2034.

Earlier Thursday, Johnson claimed that President Donald Trump had already done everything he could to mitigate the harm. But in fact, the Trump administration turned back on its own policy by claiming without precedent that it cannot legally use SNAP contingency funds to keep the essential program afloat during a government shutdown.

Instead, the Trump administration has set up a false dilemma, asserting that the government can’t continue to fund SNAP benefits without draining funds from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, which is currently being paid for by tariff money. Meanwhile, Trump had no problem moving funds to pay for military service members’ paychecks.

The United States, once a haven for people from all over the world seeking a better life, will only admit 7,500 refugees next year, and most of them will be white South Africans.

The Trump administration’s new limit, published in the Federal Registry Thursday, is much lower than the 125,000-person ceiling set by the Biden administration last year. White House officials have not commented on why the number is so low, but the registry notice states the figure is “justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest.”

The notice also refers to “victims of unjust or illegal discrimination in their respective homelands.” The only specific ethnic group mentioned in the memo is “Afrikaners from South Africa,” and President Trump has used the term “unjust racial discrimination” to criticize South Africa’s current government. (Actual Afrikaners dispute Trump’s characterization).

Refugee organizations have condemned the move. Global Refuge’s CEO Krish O’Mara Vignarajah said in a statement that the move “doesn’t just lower the refugee admissions ceiling. It lowers our moral standing.

“At a time of crisis in countries ranging from Afghanistan to Venezuela to Sudan and beyond, concentrating the vast majority of admissions on one group undermines the program’s purpose as well as its credibility,” Vignarajah’s statement said.

“By privileging Afrikaners while continuing to ban thousands of refugees who have already been vetted and approved, the administration is once again politicizing a humanitarian program,” said the International Refugee Assistance Project’s president, Sharif Aly.

It’s no secret how much racism influences the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Trump infamously complained about people from “shithole countries” immigrating to the U.S., back in his first term, and baselessly attacked Haitian immigrants during his 2024 campaign, falsely claiming that they cook cats and dogs. That kind of thinking is now replacing the U.S. legacy of welcoming refugees and immigrants from all over the world.

House Speaker Mike Johnson tried to rewrite history Thursday in order to excuse why the Trump administration won’t provide funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program starting in November.

During a press conference, Johnson was asked why the White House wasn’t planning to fund SNAP benefits through the current government shutdown, even though SNAP previously remained funded during the previous one. That one, which lasted for 35 days from 2018-2019 during Donald Trump’s first term, is the longest government shutdown in history.

“The president, this administration has done exactly what it did in the first term, and that is bend over backwards to make sure we mitigate the harm,” Johnson said, adding that Trump had “done everything he can.”

HuffPost reporter Arthur Delaney, who asked Johnson the question, wrote on X shortly after: “I think it’s pretty clear the speaker is just not aware of what happened in 2019.”

Here’s a quick refresher for those of us who, unlike Johnson, weren’t working in Congress at the time. (Johnson was first elected in 2016.) During the government shutdown in January 2019, the Trump administration instructed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to pay out SNAP benefits early, so Americans could receive February benefits. 

Continuing resolutions have historically provided that SNAP funds can be available “payments due on or about the first day of any month” that begins within 30 days after the budget expires, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. As of Thursday, the shutdown has lasted 30 days. 

During the first Trump administration, the Agriculture Department clearly and repeatedly stated that SNAP contingency funds could be used in case of a government shutdown. This was confirmed by the Office of Budget and Management. 

That was seemingly the policy of the second Trump administration as well—until  August 2025, when the USDA published a memo claiming that SNAP contingency funds could not legally be used to cover regular benefits for the 42 million Americans that use them, and that using the contingency funds would prevent additional transfers to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), which is currently being paid for by tariff money.

It seems that Johnson has been on an all-time streak of not answering questions while he runs defense for Republicans’ disastrous shutdown, taking creative liberties with the truth and refusing to actually govern.