The U.S. Must End Its Illegal Boat Strikes

The boat strikes have killed nearly 200 people, many of them fishermen. Who will be held accountable?

Image of an alleged drug boat seconds before it was destroyed in early May -- image via US Southern Command video on X

By Farrah Hassen

The U.S. military has been carrying out extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and Pacific over the past nine months with impunity.

On May 8, the U.S. military struck another boat in the eastern Pacific, killing two people and leaving one survivor. U.S. Southern Command claimed “the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes” and “was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”

According to The Intercept, there have now been 58 such boat strikes since September that have killed at least 193 people. As with the May 8 attack, the names and nationalities of most of these victims remain unknown.

The Trump administration has accused civilian boats of transporting narcotics to the U.S. and says its killing “narco-terrorists.” But the Pentagon has provided no evidence for these claims or any indication that the people killed posed an imminent threat.

International and U.S. law do not allow the use of the military to kill civilians suspected of crimes. Boat bombing on the high seas is not a legitimate law enforcement operation. Nor is it curbing the flow of drugs into the United States, as Trump claims, or combating the root causes of drug use.

Even if the boats did carry drugs, the appropriate response would be to lawfully intercept and detain the suspects and afford them due process of law.

In a desperate attempt to provide legal cover for these murders, the Trump administration is asserting that the U.S. is engaged in an “armed conflict” with unspecified drug cartels — the same kind of broad legal authority invoked by the George W. Bush administration in its post-9/11 “war on terror.”

But there is no armed conflict in the Caribbean or the Pacific. The people on those boats are civilians who are not legitimate military targets. “You just can’t call something war to give yourself war powers,” noted University of Pennsylvania professor Claire Finkelstein.

Legal and human rights experts agree.

Last October, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk condemned the boat strikes. “None of the individuals on the targeted boats appeared to pose an imminent threat to the lives of others or otherwise justified the use of lethal armed force against them under international law,” Türk said in his October 31 statement.

Despite the unsubstantiated, fear-mongering claims pushed by the Trump administration, investigations have shown that several of those people killed were fishermen trying to make a living for their families. On January 20, the U.S. attacked the Ecuadorian fishing boat La Fiorella. None of the eight fishermen aboard have been seen since.

Survivors have also endured abuse. In two separate Pacific attacks on Ecuadorian fishing boats in March, 36 survivors said they were “abducted and tortured by American forces and taken by boat all the way to El Salvador before being returned to Ecuador,” according to an investigation by Drop Site News.

“They handcuffed us, put hoods over our heads and pushed us around. We were terrified they were going to kill us,” recalled Jhonny Sebastián Palacios, one of the survivors, in an interview with The Guardian.

The U.S. must immediately end these boat strikes and take accountability for the harms caused to the victims and their families. And Congress must do its job of conducting oversight to ensure transparent and independent investigations of these strikes.

The use of unlawful force will become more normalized at home and abroad unless the Trump administration is held accountable for these illegal killings and its blatant abuse of power.

When federal immigration agents killed American citizens earlier this year, we saw all too clearly the risks of letting the government shoot people and call them “terrorists.” It leaves all of us less secure, undermines the rule of law, and can’t be allowed to become routine.

OtherWords columnist Farrah Hassen, J.D., is a writer, policy analyst, and educator. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org