Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s newly appointed chief of staff, reportedly played a central role in developing the administration’s deadly campaign against suspected drug boats operating in the Caribbean and Pacific.

Miller is already widely known as the architect of Trump’s aggressive immigration deportation operations. Those operations have sent masked federal agents into neighborhoods and resulted in deadly confrontations.

According to a former U.S. official who spoke with The Washington Post, Miller steered the drafting of a classified directive signed by Trump. The directive authorized the U.S. military to use lethal force against two dozen foreign criminal groups designated by the president as “foreign terrorist organizations.”

Legal experts have said that declaring criminal groups terrorist organizations has no basis in law. The administration has argued that the groups use narcotics as a weapon to kill Americans.

Miller initially proposed having the CIA conduct the lethal strikes, The Washington Post reported last year. Lawyers within the agency and elsewhere in the government questioned whether that proposal was legal, and policymakers ultimately decided that the Pentagon would carry out the strikes.

The strikes began as part of an operation intended to pressure then Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was captured by the United States in January. They have continued for more than a year, killing 236 people in 71 strikes, according to U.S. military figures.

In recent months, the United States has worked with countries including Ecuador to interdict suspected vessels. Legal groups have called the boat strikes illegal and condemned Miller’s promotion to White House chief of staff.

Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, sharply criticized Miller’s reported involvement. The nonprofit group has filed a lawsuit seeking the public release of the administration’s legal memo justifying the strikes.

“Public reporting reveals, unsurprisingly, that Miller was a key architect of the administration’s policy to target and kill civilians in international waters on the preposterous pretext that we are at ‘war’ with drug smugglers,” Azmy told MS NOW.

Azmy compared the boat strike policy with Miller’s immigration agenda and accused him of rejecting constitutional limits. “This lawless project of unadulterated murder, is not unlike his favorite other project to deploy militarized ICE militia in our cities to profile, punish and kill people. His abject rejection of our constitution will not last; he will be held accountable.”

The White House defended Miller and celebrated his appointment. Spokeswoman Lauren Bis credited him with advancing several major pieces of Trump’s agenda.

“Stephen Miller has been a key player in delivering on President Trump’s America First agenda since day one,” Bis told MS NOW. “He has spearheaded the administration’s crime crackdown including in D.C. and Memphis, record setting deregulation, unleashed American energy, dismantled drug cartels, and secured our border. In his new role, he will continue to deliver historic successes for the American people.”

Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior CIA official and MS NOW contributor, said the reported proposal to use the agency against suspected drug boats would have produced a “nightmare scenario” if the account is accurate.

“A highly partisan political type such as Miller would have seen the success that the CIA had in the global war on terror and probably wanted to replicate that in the Western Hemisphere, his own pet project,” Polymeropoulos said.

He warned that the proposed targets were fundamentally different and carried serious legal risks. “Yet it was an entirely different target set, almost certainly rife with legal question marks, that would have placed agency officers in serious legal jeopardy.”

Stacey Young, executive director of Justice Connection, also accused Miller of ignoring legal restraints. The organization advocates for former Justice Department employees, and Young previously worked as a Justice Department lawyer for eighteen years.

“His disdain for any legal restraint has been a hallmark of this administration,” Young said. She attributed the Justice Department leadership’s willingness to ignore court orders and pursue vindictive or frivolous litigation to Miller’s influence.