The United States has quietly accelerated a lethal campaign targeting boats in the Pacific and Caribbean, a months-long operation shrouded in secrecy that has killed nearly 200 people, with no end in sight. Since the launch of the war in Iran, U.S. military assets have killed at least 39 people accused of trafficking drugs into the U.S. At least 67 people have been killed in strikes since the beginning of the year, including at least seven strikes launched in April alone that killed 23 people.
The strikes, carried out by the Joint Special Operations Command, have killed at least 190 people since the beginning of the campaign in September. To date, Congress has not authorized the attacks, and the Pentagon has provided only limited intelligence to justify them. Growing costs for the campaign — which relies on millions of dollars in munitions, drones and secretive attack planes — are predicted to exceed $5 billion.
Donald Trump’s administration insists that the extrajudicial killings of suspected traffickers are fully within legal bounds, supported by the administration’s notice to Congress that the U.S. is formally engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels that the president has labeled “unlawful combatants.” But the military is simultaneously intercepting suspected drug boats, suggesting that the U.S. can deploy law enforcement to stop the flow of drugs into the country without killing everyone on board. Top military officials — including the commander in charge of the campaign — admit that the killings are not the way to stop them.
Escalation Amid Secrecy
Last year, the administration labeled cartels “nonstate armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States,” which is now engaged in what it calls a “noninternational armed conflict” — or war with a non-state actor. In the months that followed, the military destroyed at least 56 vessels, killing at least 190 people, which law-of-war experts speaking to The Independent have labeled outright murders and war crimes.
Footage of the first attacks were shared widely on social media by administration officials, including by the president on his Truth Social account. But the announcements have fallen into a grim routine that critics fear is normalizing the pace and scope of the killings. Posts on X from U.S. Southern Command announcing the attacks use nearly identical language, accompanied by grainy video footage of the destruction. Formulaic social media posts chronicling the strikes “risk becoming normalized and unstoppable in the eyes of lawmakers and the public,” according to the Washington Office on Latin America, a D.C. based research and advocacy group.
By labeling the boat crews as “narco-terrorists,” the administration is “weaponizing Americans’ genuine grief over drug addiction and overdoses by targeting supposed culprits,” the group wrote in a recent report. “Crucially, with the exceptions of a few known survivors, the people aboard the boats are utterly annihilated, erasing them as individuals and leaving only the menacing specter of ‘narco-terrorism’ emphasized in official rhetoric,” the group said.
Controversial Tactics
When two survivors emerged from the wreckage of the first strike on September 2, the commander overseeing the operation ordered officials to fire again. That “double-tap” order was reportedly in response to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s alleged instructions to “kill everybody” on the vessels, according to The Washington Post, citing officials with direct knowledge of the operation. “I did not personally see survivors,” Hegseth said during a cabinet meeting at the White House in December. “The thing was on fire. It exploded, there’s fire, there’s smoke.” “This is called the fog of war,” he added.
There was brief bipartisan scrutiny into the strikes after news of Hegseth’s alleged command surfaced at the end of 2025. But the administration has still not publicly provided sufficient evidence or legal justification for the attacks, according to lawmakers and civil rights groups. A spokesperson for Southern Command declined to disclose the details of assets used in operations to The Independent. The Department of Defense is “taking the fight to the cartels and defending our Homeland from Designated Terrorist Organization’s illicit activities before their violence and poison reaches our shores — this includes all our nation’s borders,” the spokesperson said.
Costs and Criticism Mount
The U.S. launched a lethal operation to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro on January 3, marking what appeared to be the culmination of Trump’s months-long pressure campaign to topple his government after building up military forces in the region and attacking boats leaving its shores. Maduro has pleaded not guilty to charges that he led a drug trafficking conspiracy. But the U.S. has killed 67 people in boat attacks since then, including at least 19 in the Caribbean.
The U.S. has spent at least $4.7 billion on the operations in Venezuela, the Caribbean and Pacific, according to research from the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. That total includes more than $3.8 million on naval deployments, $616 million on aircraft deployments, $15 million on special operation forces, and tens of millions of dollars spent on munitions, the report found.
“The Trump administration has reportedly spent billions of taxpayer dollars on lethal strikes against suspected low-level drug traffickers, which have failed to reduce illicit drug flows,” Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told The Independent. Democrats on the committee are still pressing the administration for “counternarcotics programs that work, in concert with our allies and partners and with full respect for the law,” he said.
Even top military officials concede that the attacks are not a long-term solution to combatting the flow of drugs in the U.S. Gen. Francis Donovan, who is overseeing the strikes as head of U.S. Southern Command, told members of Congress last month that the strikes are forcing alleged traffickers to change their patterns — but they’re not “the answer.” “Boat strikes aren’t the answer,” the four-star Marine Corps officer told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March. “Boat strikes will be one of the main tools, and probably not the most effective.”
