U.S. military kills six people in latest boat strike in Caribbean

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth participates in President Donald Trump’s bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia, at the White House on Oct. 20. Hegseth said today that the U.S. military had struck a boat that he asserted was carrying drugs in the Caribbean Sea, the 10th such known attack since early September.

WASHINGTON >> The U.S. military killed six people on a boat suspected of smuggling drugs from South America, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said today, as the Trump administration’s lethal and legally disputed campaign continued to escalate.

The latest attack raises the death toll from the Trump administration’s campaign on suspected drug boats to 43 in 10 known strikes — eight in the Caribbean and two more this week in the eastern Pacific.

Hegseth said in a post on social media that the strike had taken place overnight in international waters in the Caribbean Sea. He added that the vessel was “operated by” Tren de Aragua, one of several Latin American criminal groups that the administration has designated as a terrorist organization.

The defense secretary offered no evidence to support his claim but cited “our intelligence.” As with statements about previous strikes, his message contained a grainy, 20-second video clip of a boat bobbing in the water, then disappearing in an explosion.

“If you are a narco-terrorist smuggling drugs in our hemisphere, we will treat you like we treat Al-Queda,” Hegseth wrote, misspelling Al-Qaeda. “Day or NIGHT, we will map your networks, track your people, hunt you down, and kill you.”

A broad range of outside legal specialists have said that President Donald Trump and Hegseth have been giving illegal orders to the military because it is forbidden under domestic and international law to deliberately target civilians who are not directly participating in hostilities — even if they are suspected criminals.

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The United States has traditionally addressed maritime drug smuggling by using the Coast Guard, sometimes assisted by the Navy, to intercept boats. If suspicions proved accurate, it would arrest their crews. In the same way, police arrest people who are suspected of being drug dealers; it would be a crime to instead summarily kill them in the street.

The penalty for being convicted of drug trafficking is prison time, not execution.

The Trump administration has asserted that the attacks are lawful — and are not murder — because Trump has “determined” that drug trafficking by cartels constitute an armed attack on the United States and that the country is engaged in a formal armed conflict with the cartels, so boat crews can be targeted as “combatants.”

But the administration has not provided a legal theory in public or to Congress to explain how it is legitimate for Trump to bridge the conceptual gulf between drug trafficking and the kind of armed attacks that can create a legal state of armed conflict. Nor has it explained how crewing a boat carrying an illicit consumer product can make someone a lawful target as a combatant.

In the absence of a legal argument, the administration has made a policy argument. It has said it is in favor of using military force against suspected drug runners because tens of thousands of American drug users die from overdoses each year. Trump has repeatedly said that each boat the U.S. military destroys saves 25,000 lives.

About 80,000 American drug users died from overdoses last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number is down from 110,000 in 2023 but higher than it was a decade ago.

The rise in overdose deaths in recent years was caused by fentanyl, which comes from labs in Mexico. The boats that the U.S. military attacked were coming from South America, which produces cocaine.

Since returning to office in January, Trump has designated a series of Latin American drug cartels and criminal gangs, including Tren de Aragua, as terrorist organizations. Hegseth has repeatedly compared them to al-Qaida.

Congress authorized an armed conflict with al-Qaida after it attacked the United States on 9/11; lawmakers have not authorized a war on unrelated other terrorist groups. The designations are also disputed since, by definition, terrorists are motivated by ideological or religious goals, while cartels seek illicit profits.

The law that empowers the executive branch to designate a group as a foreign terrorist organization permits freezing its assets and also makes it a crime to provide support to that group. What it does not do is authorize the summary killing of people suspected of being members of the group.

Hegseth’s description of the 10th attack as targeting a boat associated with Tren de Aragua refocused the operation on Venezuela. Trump described the first strike, on Sept. 2, as killing 11 people he accused of having been members of that gang. The second strike, on Sept. 15, killed three people he said were from Venezuela.

But President Gustavo Petro of Colombia said one of the people killed on Sept. 15 was a Colombian fisherman and accused the United States of murder. For subsequent strikes, the administration largely did not identify a nationality or membership of the targets in a particular organization.

In a fourth strike, on Oct. 3, the U.S. military killed four men whom Petro later said were Colombian citizens. The sixth strike, on a semisubmersible vessel, killed two people but had two survivors, one of whom was repatriated to Colombia.

The seventh strike, on Oct. 17, killed three men the administration accused of smuggling drugs for the National Liberation Army, a Marxist rebel group in Colombia known as the ELN, which the State Department designated as terrorists in 1997. The eighth and ninth strikes were in the eastern Pacific, off the coast of Colombia.

In the buildup to the boat strikes operation as well as in its opening phase, the Trump administration largely focused on Venezuela and its authoritarian leader, President Nicolás Maduro, who has been indicted in the United States on drug trafficking charges. The administration has called him illegitimate and portrayed him as the head of a drug cartel.

The Trump administration is also considering options for land strikes in Venezuela and trying to use force to remove Maduro. Proponents of a regime-change operation include Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2025 The New York Times Company

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