Trump Terror Policy Massively Expands US List Of Bad Guys

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The main US terrorist list has sprawled beyond traditional terrorist organizations. These are defined as ideologically motivated groups using intentional violence against civilians to achieve political goals.

In February 2025, the Trump administration added 15 groups to the terrorist list that are probably best described as drug cartels or gangs – such as the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico and gangs in Haiti and Central America.

Most people in the US had probably never heard of these groups, such as Gran Grif in Haiti and Los Lobos in Ecuador.

Especially perplexing to many analysts is why criminal groups would be added to a terrorist list. There are already US sanctions for criminal organizations, such as the Kingpin Act, which bans financial transactions with drug cartels and freezes their assets.

Apart from anything else, it stretches the resources of US crime-fighting agencies away from actual terrorist groups. And it seems to green-light excessive and counterproductive policies toward criminal organizations.

A growing body of research shows that counterterrorism and counterinsurgency used against drug cartels or gangs often backfire, leading to increased violence.

This expansion of the“war on terror” to criminal groups has been used to justify more than 100 deaths (so far) in missile strikes, and the overthrow of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro.

The Trump administration has justified the missile strikes with the language of counter-terrorism. Trump announced the first attack, on September 2 2025, with an explanation on social media indicating that the targeted group, Tren de Aragua, is an FTO.

There have now been 35 similar strikes, killing approximately 120 people.

America does not claim, however, that the targeted boats carry bombs or guns, the typical tools of terrorists. The boats are attacked because they are alleged to carry drugs – even though drug trafficking is almost never a death penalty offense in the US.

There have not been any missile strikes since Maduro's capture on January 3. The US president justified the raid by saying that Maduro was the head of the Cartel de los Soles, which was designated as an FTO in 2025.

But, two days after Maduro's capture, the US justice department dropped the claim that the cartel exists. It changed its indictment against the Venezuelan president to instead nominate him as sitting at the top of a system of corrupt patronage under which drug trafficking has flourished.

The US has certainly carried out regime change before, notably in Panama in 1989 when it captured and removed the country's dictator, Manuel Noriega, who had been indicted before his capture. He was subsequently convicted and jailed in the US.

But the use of counterterrorism law, language and lethal tactics abroad for drug traffickers – to this degree, in an extended military campaign – represents an unprecedented escalation.

A new path

These changes are all the more remarkable because they are part of a decoupling from traditional US allies on counterterrorism.

For decades, the US set the standard on counterterrorism. Analyses of the dozens of terrorist lists around the world demonstrate that when the US designated a certain group as terrorists, its allies tended to follow suit – until 2025, that is.