“Our military boat strikes have virtually stopped drugs coming into our country by sea.”

Drugs kept moving by sea after the strikes began in September 2025. Months after the State of the Union, the Department of Homeland Security reported that the Coast Guard's Operation Pacific Viper in the Eastern Pacific had passed 225,000 pounds of cocaine seized since August 2025, and that "eighty percent of all seizures of U.S.-bound narcotics occur at sea." The Coast Guard had already seized a record of nearly 510,000 pounds of cocaine in fiscal 2025, which ended September 30, 2025, more than three times its annual average.

A Drug Enforcement Administration assessment reported by The Washington Post found the strikes had not curbed supply: "Smugglers have adapted to the intensified pressure. Price and availability have not been noticeably affected." The White House says the campaign has discouraged smugglers, but no public measure shows an effect on drugs reaching the country.

Since September 2025 the strikes have hit at least 40 vessels and killed at least 149 people, yet the administration has not provided evidence of what the destroyed boats were carrying. Drug-policy experts say traffickers simply reroute: they are "expert at reconfiguring routes, finding new ways to ship things," per the International Crisis Group, and boats from Venezuela historically carry cocaine, not the fentanyl driving U.S. overdose deaths. "No one knows how much doesn't get caught, so no one can cite a precise percentage change. Trump is making a claim about something that is unknowable." — Jonathan Caulkins, Carnegie Mellon University drug policy researcher, to PolitiFact