The Third Circuit Court of Appeals this week upheld the conviction of a Costa Rican man who was arrested in November 2020 when the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted a vessel in international waters off the coast of Colombia.
According to an affidavit signed by a Drug Enforcement Administration special agent, the vessel had nearly 850 pounds of cocaine and three men aboard: Randar Vasquez Munoz and Mainor Salazar Montero, of Costa Rica, and Murillo Gomez Eleuterio, of Colombia.
“The small vessel was in international waters, transiting in a known drug trafficking vector, and displaying no indicia of nationality; there was no flag being flown, no registration documents, and no markings on the hull of the vessel,” according to the affidavit. “The vessel was determined to be one without nationality, thus subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.”
Munoz challenged that jurisdiction during legal proceedings and argued that the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act — under which he was charged with conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute a controlled substance — was unconstitutional. He signed a conditional plea agreement in 2024 but preserved his right to appeal certain issues — including a motion to dismiss the indictment, which was dismissed without an evidentiary hearing.
“Munoz argues that (1) the MDLE A … is unconstitutional, and (2) the District Court was required to hold an evidentiary hearing on his jurisdictional challenge,” the Third Circuit wrote in an opinion issued Tuesday. “Neither argument is availing.”
In his appeal, Munoz argued that the Act exceeded U.S. Congress’s authority under the Felonies Clause of the United States Constitution. The appeals court noted that the Felonies Clause is contained within the Define and Punish Clause, which the U.S. Supreme Court “has construed … to provide Congress with three distinct powers: (1) to define and punish piracies under the ‘Piracies Clause’: (2) to define and punish felonies committed on the high seas under the ‘Felonies Clause’: and (3) to define and punish offenses against the Law of Nations under the ‘Offenses Clause.’”
“Congress used the second of these powers — the power granted to it under the Felonies Clause — to enact MDLEA,” the court opined.
The court also rejected Munoz’s argument that he was improperly denied an evidentiary hearing, noting that the parties had agreed on the material facts of the case. Evidentiary hearings resolve factual disputes, the court wrote, not legal ones.
“The stipulated facts make plain that no one aboard the vessel took any of the actions necessary to claim nationality or registry for the vessel. Because no one made such a claim, it is impossible that the ‘master or individual in charge’ of the vessel did so upon the Coast Guard’s request,” according to the court’s opinion, which made it a vessel without nationality. “And a ‘vessel without a nationality’ is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States …. No hearing was necessary.”
Munoz and his colleagues were arrested long before the Trump administration elevated the United States’ military posture in the Caribbean as part of a supposed crackdown on drug smuggling, but the Third Circuit’s precedential opinion comes amid mounting and unanswered questions about the legality of military strikes on suspected drug trafficking boats.
“If a president can murder civilians at sea and keep the legal justifications secret, we should all be concerned. The harm is even worse when basic factual evidence, such as full videos and orders, are also hidden from the American people,” the American Civil Liberties Union wrote last month. “Since September, the Trump administration has ordered 26 lethal strikes on civilian boats in international waters, killing 99 people and upending countless lives. The administration continues to push unsubstantiated, fear-mongering claims about who these people were, despite investigations showing that some of those killed were fishermen just trying to make a living for their families. The administration also refuses to release the secret memo that purports to provide legal justification for these killings, or the full, unedited videos of the strikes themselves.”
Matters escalated last weekend when the U.S. military captured Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and transported them to New York to face drug trafficking charges. President Donald Trump then took to social media to claim that Venezuela would soon be sending the United States 30-50 million barrels of oil and that the profits from their sale would be used “to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States.” Administration officials have since sketched out plans to essentially control the country’s oil sales.
