Top military officers from a secretive command watched a speedboat cut through the waters of the Caribbean Sea, early last September. A plane above provided live video of the vessel and the 11 men on board. In the early morning hours, Adm. Frank Bradley sought the counsel of his top legal adviser, Col. Cara Hamaguchi. Then he ordered SEAL Team 6 operators to attack the packed boat.
After the vessel exploded, two helpless survivors pulled themselves onto a fragment of the overturned hull, drifting with the current for roughly 45 minutes. Bradley — then the head of the Joint Special Operations Command and now the four-star chief of Special Operations Command — again turned to Hamaguchi for guidance. Soon, a second missile screamed down, killing the survivors. Two more missiles followed in rapid succession, sinking the remnants of the boat.
That strike, carried out on September 2, 2025, began a campaign of attacks that has never ceased.
“It’s been a year of murders,” said a defense official who was horrified by the first strike and has remained so as the U.S. has targeted scores of so-called “drug boats” in the year since. “The Trump administration has normalized murder.” The official added: “It’s absolutely criminal.”
“The Trump administration has normalized murder.”
In all, the U.S. has conducted more than 65 attacks, resulting in over 225 civilians killed in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean in the last year. The most recent strike, in the Caribbean on August 25, killed four people.
A classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — drawn up by an interagency lawyers working group including representatives of the CIA, State Department, White House, Department of Justice, and Defense Department — claims that narcotics on supposed drug boats are lawful military targets because they generate revenue for cartels whom the Trump administration claims are engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with the United States. Attached to that secret memo is a similarly secret list of “designated terrorist organizations.”
A second government official who has reviewed the OLC opinion called it “flimsy yet expansive,” but said the Trump administration had “nonetheless managed to overstep” its bounds. The official said that despite being crafted to “excuse what is clearly murder,” the U.S. had killed people beyond those the OLC opinion claimed were legal targets.
U.S. Southern Command pushed back on the allegation. “Each operation is planned and executed within the full bounds of our legal framework,” said spokesperson Steven McLoud, “ensuring that every target meets the legal criteria established by our Office of Legal Counsel.”
“There is no plausible legal justification for the strikes.”
Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because people are deliberately slain outside the law. The strikes may also constitute crimes against humanity, violating fundamental rights to life and due process. “There is no plausible legal justification for the strikes. They’re obviously not occurring in the context of an armed conflict and outside of armed conflict, the term for premeditated killing is murder,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and specialist in counterterrorism issues and the laws of war, told The Intercept.
The Intercept broke the story of the September 2 double-tap strikes, within days of the attack. Months later, follow-up reporting by the Washington Post, The Intercept, and others resulted in a public firestorm that forced the Pentagon to admit the survivors were killed while shipwrecked — a clear breach of international law — and provide members of Congress additional briefings and access to classified footage of the attack.
The Intercept was also the first outlet to report on Hamaguchi’s identity and role in the attack, as well as an admission in a classified briefing by Rear Adm. Brian H. Bennett — a military officer overseeing Special Operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff — that some of the 11 people aboard the boat could have been human trafficking victims. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who serves on both the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, sent a letter to President Donald Trump last month pressing for accountability and referencing The Intercept’s reporting on Bennett’s disclosure. Kaine found, after reviewing highly classified materials, that the “available evidence suggests that the United States has killed individuals who are not involved in narcotrafficking.”
Even a year later, much about the attacks and the victims remains unknown. “This is probably one of the hardest U.S. campaigns to track — searching an area double the size of the continental U.S. for clues, with limited satellite imagery, few witnesses and little physical aftermath. The ocean swallows up all the information we would usually rely on,” said Emily Tripp, the executive director of Airwars, a U.K.-based group that monitors conflicts all across the globe. “The more than 200 people killed across these waters have a right to be remembered — and their loved ones have a right to know what has happened.”
“The ocean swallows up all the information we would usually rely on.”
Twenty-six of the 227 total killed have been identified by name, according to an Airwars analysis. All are apparently men and, for those whose ages are known, were between 24 and 46 years old. Of 41 victims identified by nationality, 18 were from Venezuela, 13 from Mexico, three from Colombia, three from Ecuador, two from Trinidad and Tobago, and two from Saint Lucia. Among those identified by a consortium of journalists from Venezuelan outlets were a bus driver, a mototaxi driver, men involved in fishing or the seafood trade, and a futsal player. They hailed from poor communities, and their ties to the drug trade were at the very lowest levels.
Reporting by The Intercept also found that claims by the White House and Defense Department about the boat strikes stopping the flow of fentanyl and saving more than 1 million American lives are baseless, phony, or both.
“The administration is killing for online content and spectacle,” said Finucane, referencing the Trump administration’s use of highly edited snuff-film footage of attacks on social media. At the same time, the Pentagon has consistently withheld basic information about the strikes, the legal justifications for them, the “designated terrorist organizations” being targeted by the campaign, and the victims. The administration has been so secretive that the bipartisan 2026 annual defense policy bill withholds 25 percent of travel funds from Hegseth’s office until overdue reports on execute orders and unedited video footage of strikes are delivered to Congress.
The boat strike campaign, dubbed Operation Southern Spear, hit its peak intensity just over a year ago. October 2025 was its deadliest month with 12 boats attacked and 44 declared deaths. December was the most active period, with 14 vessels struck. In almost all the attacks, between one and four people were killed. In only one strike did the death toll of a single boat reach double digits: the first attack on September 2, 2025.
While all September 2025 strikes took place in the Caribbean, the attacks moved west. By December, all 14 were conducted in the Pacific Ocean. The Intercept’s boat strike tracker counts 50 strikes in the Pacific out of a total of 68 attacks in the past year.
In almost every month of the campaign, the U.S. failed to immediately kill all crew members in its initial strike. But of the 28 survivors, only three were successfully rescued and remain alive. In nine of 11 survivor announcements, the U.S. Coast Guard was named as the primary responder. The Intercept revealed that the U.S. rescue strategy was leaving survivors to drown. Eight men leapt into rough seas on December 30, 2025, for example, after the U.S. rained down a barrage of munitions, sinking three vessels. They required immediate rescue; chances were slim that they could survive even an hour. In announcing its strike, SOUTHCOM said it “immediately notified” the Coast Guard to launch search and rescue protocols to save the men. But an investigation by The Intercept and Airwars found that it took the Coast Guard almost 45 hours to begin searching the attack zone for survivors.
Strikes slowed dramatically in January 2026 — with just one strike that killed two people — during the same month that the U.S. invaded Venezuela and abducted its president, Nicolás Maduro. In late June, U.S. forces took a hiatus from attacks. Officials offered conflicting reasons for the pause, with some reports centering on equipment and personnel being used for earthquake relief in Venezuela. After 63 days, the U.S. resumed strikes on August 23, in the Pacific, quickly followed by the Caribbean attack on August 25.
The boat strike campaign was, in many respects, the opening salvo of an aggressive military and diplomatic effort in the Americas — dubbed the Donroe Doctrine — that has spawned more violence, increased impunity by local security forces, and heightened danger from cartels across the Western Hemisphere, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project.
In addition to the war in Venezuela, the U.S. also launched or ramped up numerous initiatives and interventions. This includes the now 19-member Americas Counter Cartel Coalition — also known as the Shield of the Americas — which Hegseth recently christened with the motto: “We do bad things to bad people.” The U.S. also launched a CIA campaign — which may involve private contractors and authorities from other countries — targeting boats near the Galápagos Islands; covert CIA operations in Mexico; a military airstrike inside Venezuela in June that allegedly killed Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, the head of the Tren de Aragua street gang; and joint counter-cartel operations in Ecuador dubbed “Operation Total Extermination,” which include ground operations by elite U.S. troops.
“I also want to commend Honduras and Guatemala for inviting the United States to partake in combined operations against narco-terrorists in their countries,” Hegseth announced recently, adding: “We look forward to working with you in killing bad guys.” Jamaica also signed a status of forces agreement with the U.S., which sets terms for troop deployments, including joint operations. Hegseth said the partnership would “cripple narco-terrorists that transit through the Caribbean.” Beyond this, the Trump administration has also repeatedly bullied Panama and threatened Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, and perhaps also Iceland.
Last month, SOUTHCOM chief Gen. Francis L. Donovan announced the creation of Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere, which the command called an “evolution from Operation Southern Spear.” JTF-WHEM will, said SOUTHCOM, “provide unified command and control at the tactical and operational levels, integrating military capabilities with the … partner nations of the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition.” SOUTHCOM failed to clarify if so-called A3C partner troops were under the operational control of U.S. officers, as is the case under other low-profile proxy-war programs.
Hegseth told coalition partners that the new task force would “continue the targeting and killing of narco-terrorists,” whom he dubbed “the ISIS and Al Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere.” Days later, the boat strikes resumed. And on Friday, JTF-WHEM and Ecuadorean forces interdicted what SOUTHCOM claimed was “a floating refueling station in support of illicit at-sea drug trafficking” linked to “the Los Choneros violent narco-terrorist organization” in the Pacific. Marines and sailors “boarded, searched, and cleared the vessel without incident,” turned the crew over to Ecuador, and then sank the vessel.
Acting Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez did not reply to a request for comment on whether the U.S. had killed people beyond those the Office of Legal Counsel opinion claimed were legal targets.
“The boat strikes are, perhaps, the most stark testament to the lawlessness of the Trump administration,” Finucane told The Intercept. “It’s essentially serial killing at sea — murder under federal law — being carried out as a matter of state policy.”
