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Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Sec­re­tary Kristi Noem on Thurs­day linked the seizure of an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela to the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s coun­ter­drug ef­forts in Latin Amer­i­ca as ten­sions es­ca­late with the gov­ern­ment of Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro.

Noem’s as­ser­tion, which came dur­ing her tes­ti­mo­ny to the House Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Com­mit­tee, pro­vid­ed the Re­pub­li­can ad­min­is­tra­tion’s most thor­ough as­sess­ment so far of why it took con­trol of the ves­sel on Wednes­day. In­cred­i­bly un­usu­al, the use of U.S. forces to seize a mer­chant ship was a sharp es­ca­la­tion in the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s pres­sure cam­paign on Maduro, who has been charged with nar­coter­ror­ism in the Unit­ed States. Trump of­fi­cials added to it Thurs­day by im­pos­ing sanc­tions on three of Maduro’s nephews.

The Venezue­lan leader dis­cussed the ris­ing ten­sions with Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin on Thurs­day. The Krem­lin said in a state­ment that Putin reaf­firmed his sup­port for Maduro’s pol­i­cy of “pro­tect­ing na­tion­al in­ter­ests and sov­er­eign­ty in the face of grow­ing ex­ter­nal pres­sure.”Asked to de­lin­eate the U.S. Coast Guard’s role in the tanker seizure, Noem called it “a suc­cess­ful op­er­a­tion di­rect­ed by the pres­i­dent to en­sure that we’re push­ing back on a regime that is sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly cov­er­ing and flood­ing our coun­try with dead­ly drugs and killing our next gen­er­a­tion of Amer­i­cans.”