US military strikes another alleged drug-trafficking boat in the Caribbean, killing 3
By Riane Lumer, CNN
(CNN) — The US military carried out another deadly strike on alleged drug-traffickers at sea on Saturday, continuing a monthslong campaign by the Trump administration that has been widely criticized as likely illegal.
The latest strike targeted a boat in the Caribbean Sea and killed three people on board, according to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
“Today, at the direction of President Trump, the Department of War carried out a lethal kinetic strike on another narco-trafficking vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO) in the Caribbean,” Hegseth announced on X with an unclassified video of the strike.
Hegseth said three men, whom he identified as “narco-terrorists,” were killed in the operation, which he said was carried out in international waters. No US forces were harmed in the strike, he noted.
The boat was “carrying narcotics” and “transiting along a known narco-trafficking route,” Hegseth said, citing US intelligence.
Saturday’s attack marks the 15th known US military strike on an alleged drug-smuggling vessel since the Trump administration began the operations in early September. The strikes, which have been carried out in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean, have killed a total of 64 people.
“These narco-terrorists are bringing drugs to our shores to poison Americans at home—and they will not succeed. The Department will treat them EXACTLY how we treated Al-Qaeda,” Hegseth said Saturday.
Saturday’s strike is the first targeting a boat in the Caribbean since October 24. After concentrating on the region initially, the Pentagon in recent weeks deliberately refocused its efforts against suspected drug traffickers to the eastern Pacific, CNN reported Friday.
The shift was made because administration officials believe they have stronger evidence linking cocaine transport to the US from those western routes, according to people familiar with the matter. Six known strikes have been carried out in the Pacific over the last two weeks, including three conducted in a single day last week.
Democrats in Congress and international leaders have questioned the legality of the Trump administration’s accelerating strikes.
On Friday, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said the strikes violate international law and called for them to stop.
“These attacks and their mounting human cost are unacceptable. The US must halt such attacks and take all measures necessary to prevent the extrajudicial killing of people aboard these boats,” human rights commissioner Volker Türk said, according to a statement released by his office.
The Trump administration has produced a classified legal opinion that justifies lethal strikes against a secret and expansive list of cartels and suspected drug traffickers, CNN previously reported. The opinion argues that the president is allowed to authorize deadly force against a broad range of cartels because they pose an imminent threat to Americans.
On Capitol Hill, Democratic lawmakers have accused the administration of lacking transparency about the strikes. A closed-door briefing Thursday lacked critical details and Pentagon lawyers were pulled from the session at the last minute, Democrats asserted last week.
A day earlier, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner blasted the Trump administration for holding a briefing that day on the strikes but not telling Democrats about it, calling the move “a partisan stunt.”
While traveling in Asia on Friday, Hegseth insisted he had engaged Congress on a bipartisan basis regarding the strikes. However, that same day, Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker, a Republican, and Ranking Member Jack Reed, a Democrat, released two letters they said they sent Hegseth over the past month seeking details about the operations but that have gone unanswered.
CNN’s Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, Kaanita Iyer, and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn contributed to this report.
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