When the Trump administration’s war on drugs came to Franklin, N.H., the coordinated raids — complete with flash-bang grenades — were touted as targeting operatives of Mexico’s feared Sinaloa Cartel and netted 27 arrests in the town.

The raids tallied 171 arrests throughout New England, and more than 600 worldwide, and were announced on social media by the US Drug Enforcement Administration under the hashtag #SinaloaCrackdown2025.

“These results demonstrate the full weight of DEA’s commitment to protecting the American people,” DEA Administrator Terrance Cole insisted in the posting. “DEA will not relent until the Sinaloa Cartel is dismantled from top to bottom.”

Speaking about the 171 arrests from the late August raids, New England DEA head Jarod Forget said, “These are high-level arrests, not low-level retail distribution. They are members of the Sinaloa Cartel.”

The Globe Spotlight team, which contacted 75 law enforcement agencies, conducted scores of interviews, and examined more than 1,650 pages of court records, found otherwise. Most of the arrests were of addicts and low-level dealers; 10 people living in a Franklin homeless encampment were also arrested. They may have been consumers of the cartel’s product, but “high-level” members of a Mexican drug cartel? Really?

Of the 27 arrested in Franklin, the Globe found that only three were accused of dealing sufficient quantities of drugs to be held in jail and none faced federal charges. Even the press release put out by the DEA didn’t name names.

Hannah Gonthier, who was arrested in the tent she lives in in the New Hampshire woods, told the Globe, “(The DEA) wanted to accomplish something huge. They didn’t care how. They lied.”

All of this — call it political hype, administrative sloppiness, or outright lying — takes on added relevance as President Trump’s war on drugs has taken to the seas, targeting what he and the military insist are drug boats on their way from Venezuela and Colombia to dump their deadly cargo on US shores.

The military strikes — 14 in all — have killed 61 people thus far. They began just days after the DEA’s “Sinaloa Crackdown” and purport to target narco-terrorist gangs, such as Tren de Aragua, which was said to be the subject of that first strike on a Venezuelan boat in international waters on Sept. 2 that killed all 11 on board.

Unlike the DEA raid, however, there is no court to appeal to. In fact, there’s no process at all.

“I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country,” Trump said last week when pressed about why he didn’t seek a declaration of war from Congress. “OK, we’re going to kill them. You know, they’re going to be, like, dead.”

Thus far, the only Republican to take issue with the policy has been Senator Rand Paul, who called the raids what they truly are, “extrajudicial killings.”

“So far, they have alleged that these people are drug dealers,” Paul said in an interview on Fox News. “No one said their name. No one said what evidence. No one said whether they’re armed. And we’ve had no evidence presented.”

Few of the names of those killed in the raids have become known. One casualty of an Oct. 14 strike was identified by his family as 26-year-old Chad Joseph, who according to them was a fisherman from Trinidad and Tobago who had been living in Venezuela for several months. There have been three reported survivors of the airstrikes, two of whom were said to be repatriated, one to Colombia and one to Ecuador, thus presumably saving the United States the expense and potential embarrassment of bringing them to US shores. The choice to release people that the administration had claimed were dangerous criminals certainly raises questions about the quality of the evidence behind the lethal strikes.

It was following that mid-October raid that the military commander overseeing the alleged drug boat strikes, Admiral Alvin Holsey, stepped down less than a year into his stint as head of the US Southern Command — typically a three-year posting.

His official retirement will come at the end of the year, but leaving Southcom at a critical junction — and even as the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier and its escort ships are headed to Latin America — certainly attracted the attention of at least Democratic members of Congress.

“At a moment when US forces are building up across the Caribbean and tensions with Venezuela are at a boiling point, the departure of our top military commander in the region sends an alarming signal of instability within the chain of command,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island said in a statement.

Reed, ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, also expressed growing concern over Trump’s real military aims in Venezuela, given his avowed dislike for its president, Nicolás Maduro, and preference for regime change.

The Defense Department meanwhile has been happy to share videos of its strikes but little else — certainly not the names of those killed in the raids or evidence of the drugs salvaged or destroyed. And Trump’s only reference to drug cargo ” splattered all over the ocean “ dates back to September, at a time when the president was at least a little forthcoming about the source of information about the boats.

“We have recorded proof and evidence,” Trump said then. “We know what time they were leaving, when they were leaving, what they had, and all of the other things that you’d like to have.”

The administration insists it has held nine bipartisan classified briefings for members of Congress, but who gets invited — or disinvited — remains open to question. And few, including Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, who attended Thursday’s briefing, leave satisfied.

There are few things more destructive of democracy than a government that lies to its own people. This administration outright lied about arrests close to home, labeling dozens of drug users and low-level offenders as members of some notorious Mexican cartel.

It has since gone on to call in military airstrikes on boats it insists are running drugs in international waters and operated by narco-terrorists — without producing evidence of any of that or naming any of the dozens of people killed in the process.

In this case, “trust us, we’re the government” really isn’t good enoug