Trump Says “98%” of Drug Trafficking Into the U.S. Has Stopped. The DEA Says He’s a Liar.

Lord knows, if there’s one thing the United States government abhors, it’s an unnecessary loss of life. After all, if we’re going to be killing hundreds of people–none of them proven to be guilty of anything–in a purely extrajudicial fashion that violates international law, we’re at least going to be damn sure that it’s achieving an important U.S. goal, right? We wouldn’t just do that shit for no good reason, or spend millions/billions doing it. Or would we? Because to listen to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) tell it, despite the fact that we’ve blown up at least 67 “suspected” drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean since September of last year, and killed 221 people doing it without bothering to prove that those people were guilty of any crime, we haven’t actually made even the slightest dent in the flow of illicit drugs coming to the U.S. from South and Central America. This, despite the President of the United States making claims such as saying that “98.2% of Drugs coming into the U.S. by Ocean or Sea have STOPPED!” In acknowledging reality, the DEA becomes the latest government agency to directly call Donald Trump a massive liar.

A recent, unreported assessment by the DEA, discovered and reviewed by The Washington Post, effectively makes the case that the wanton, likely illegal killings carried out by the U.S. military as part of “Operation Southern Spear” have had zero effect on materially impacting the quantity of drugs–almost entirely cocaine–that actually makes it to the United States. The boat strike campaign hasn’t affected the availability of cocaine in the U.S., nor the downright affordable price of that cocaine. It hasn’t even made the cocaine on the streets any less pure, according to laboratory testing. There might even be MORE coke in the U.S. than before. The Pentagon told officials and lawmakers as much last month in closed-door briefings, while Marine Gen. Francis L. Donovan, who was put in charge of the boat strikes as the head of Southern Command, told the Senate Armed Forces Committee that the strikes were “probably not the most effective tool” and “aren’t the answer” to stopping the flow of drugs. At the same time, he claimed that the strikes had been “putting total systemic friction from point of production to point of delivery” on traffickers. Which is another way of saying “mildly inconveniencing them, while they find new ways to make lucrative profits.”

The DEA, meanwhile, is a whole lot more sober when it comes to the utter futility of the campaign that U.S. Southern Command has been carrying out. Said one anonymous DEA official to WaPo, obviously fearing Trump admin retribution: “When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other side. They always find the weak spots and exploit them.”

67 boat strikes

221 people killed

EXCLUSIVE: Operation Southern Spear has not reduced the volume, availability, purity or price of cocaine arriving in the U.S., according to an internal DEA assessment and a closed-door Pentagon briefing for senators, and has made enforcement more difficult

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— Matthew Hay Brown (@matthewhaybrown.bsky.social) 9:46 AM · Jul 27, 2026

Not that any of this seems like it would require the input of some kind of criminal genius. For instance, the DEA notes that because U.S. Southern Command had made a habit of targeting small, fast-moving boats moving along what it always called “known narco-trafficking routes,” traffickers have simply moved larger amounts of drugs onto commercial vessels that are afforded more protection and travel closer to the coast. They’re also apparently relying more on light planes and unregistered airstrips in countries such as Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana and Suriname, and there’s likewise been an uptick in drug trafficking over land. Who would have thought that millions of dollars in profits could serve as an effective incentive for traffickers and smugglers to figure out some small changes in logistics?

Don’t bring up any of this stuff to the White House, though. As far as they’re concerned, the country now resides in a drug-free paradise where addicts are no longer able to locate a fix, and raves everywhere have gone cold and silent. According to White House spokesperson Anna Kelly, speaking to WaPo: “These measures have not only eliminated narcoterrorists themselves, but also discouraged bad actors from trying to smuggle drugs into our country should they meet the same deadly fate. President Trump is using every tool at his disposal to save lives from the scourge of illicit narcotics, and any suggestion that these efforts have not been effective are laughable.”

Well I guess it’s time for Trump to laugh it up at his own DEA then, and its Administrator Terrance C. “Terry” Cole, who is of course one of his own appointees. Because they note that the price of cocaine in Florida has actually dropped roughly 50% in the last five years and is now at all-time lows, thanks to the endless supply. And that makes perfect sense, given that the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime reported last month in its annual World Drug Report 2026 that global cocaine production is at all-time highs, with Central and South American production tripling in the last decade. This is likewise backed up by the fact that the drug boats that are actually detained/apprehended in American waters by the Coast Guard–doing real work, rather than military playacting–are stuffed with more cocaine than ever before. Last December, we seized a single boat with more than $28 million in street-value cocaine.

Hegseth’s 67 deadly drug boat strikes have not stopped cocaine from flooding into the US. Trump’s own DEA says so: report

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— The Independent (@the-independent.com) 12:42 PM · Jul 27, 2026

“The business is so extraordinarily profitable that the cartels do not mind paying freight costs that are five or even 10 times higher,” said an Ecuadorian naval intelligence official.

Couple all of that with the gleeful bloodlust of both the administration, which likes to pretend to perform fake “search and rescue” missions for drug boat survivors 48 hours after they get exploded, and the apologists who make up the MAGA mediascape, and it seems clear that the boat strikes have only ever existed for the sake of deadly macho posturing. Just some good old-fashioned scapegoating of an acceptable enemy, the kind of which Megyn Kelly said the following in December: “I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water—whether they’re on the boat or in the water—but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so that they lose a limb and bleed out a little.” Teensy reminder that the people she’s talking about in this scenario are people who may or may not be trafficking drugs, because we don’t bother to check or confirm that before firing missiles at them.

Leave it to the Trump administration and the U.S. military to forge ahead on a path that manages to spend vast amounts of money and manpower, commits plenty of extrajudicial killings and international crimes, targets people who may or may not be innocent, and degrades U.S. diplomatic standing around the world … while not actually impacting the flow of the drugs we’re fighting in any way.