The Department of Homeland Security is under fire after being caught promoting an old photo of a drug bust to justify a deadly U.S. military strike at sea — a blunder that’s now raising new questions about truth, accountability, and America’s widening war on narcotics.
The controversy began Monday, when the official DHS News account on X posted an image of a motorboat allegedly linked to “narco-terrorists.”
“Colombian President claims one of the Narco boats destroyed by the U.S. Naval Task Force was ‘just a poor Colombian fisherman,’” the DHS post read. “Does this look like a fishing boat? It looks like he had tons of bait (cocaine, attracts lots of fish). Colombian president is a liar!!”
The image showed the back of a small motorboat stacked with what looked like bags of cocaine. But it didn’t take long for online sleuths — and journalists — to uncover the truth. The photo was nearly a year old, taken from a 2024 Spanish operation off the coast of the Canary Islands, about 1,000 kilometers from the area in question.
The discovery led to a swift backlash. A community note, added to the post by X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking feature, confirmed the origin of the image: “This photo is from a drug bust that occurred in 2024, zero ties to the current situation. Photo is taken from the video attached in the article below.”
Within hours, DHS deleted the post — but the damage was already done.
“It’s still shocking to me how brazenly they lie,” political commentator Krystal Ball said on her program Monday night. “They’ve normalized deception as a political tool, and they do it because they think no one will hold them accountable.”
The incident marks the latest in a series of misleading posts from the Trump administration and its allies in recent months. Earlier this October, the White House X account shared a montage of ICE raids it said depicted “chaos in Chicago,” complete with voiceovers of Trump calling the city a “mess.” The footage was later revealed to have been filmed in Florida — the palm trees were the giveaway.
But the stakes in the DHS post are much higher. The image was used to defend a controversial series of U.S. naval strikes that Trump claims are part of an “armed conflict” with Latin American drug cartels. At least six such attacks have been confirmed since June, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 29 people. The administration has yet to provide evidence that those killed were smugglers — or even armed.
One strike, in particular, has drawn international outrage. In mid-September, a boat allegedly carrying narcotics was destroyed off Colombia’s coast, killing a man later identified by Petro as Alejandro Carranza, a fisherman whose vessel had been disabled and adrift.
“U.S. government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters,” Petro said.
Trump responded by branding the Colombian president an “illegal drug leader” and threatened to impose new tariffs on Colombian exports, accusing the country of “doing nothing to stop” drug production.
Now, with the DHS caught misrepresenting evidence, pressure is mounting for an investigation into how U.S. agencies are verifying — or manipulating — the imagery used to justify military action.
