Article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“This is a make-believe armed conflict, but these are very real killings,” said one legal expert.
Wednesday marked one year since President Donald Trump began bombing boats allegedly smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean—a grim anniversary that sparked a fresh wave of condemnation from rights advocates across the United States and beyond.
“For a year now, the Trump administration has engaged in a terrifying, lawless killing campaign at sea and has yet to provide the public with anything beyond the most threadbare justifications,” said Jeff Stein, staff attorney with ACLU’s National Security Project, in a statement late Tuesday.
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The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights are suing over the administration’s refusal to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request for a legal opinion authored by the US Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) attempting to justify the strikes.
“These strikes have devastated countless families, terrified communities, and, by the administration’s own admission, failed to achieve their purported goal of stopping drugs from entering into the United States,” Stein said. “We urge leaders in both Congress and the executive branch to put an immediate end to these strikes before anyone else is killed.”
Despite mounting outrage over the bombings, which have killed at least 227 people and, as Amnesty International USA’s national director for government relations, Amanda Klasing, highlighted Monday, “are illegal under both international and US law,” the Republican-controlled Congress has failed to pass any war powers resolutions intended to stop the campaign.
“The Trump administration has summarily killed more than 200 people over the course of the past year, bragging about these killings online and facing no accountability,” Ida Sawyer, crisis, conflict, and arms director at Human Rights Watch, said Wednesday. “The victims and their loved ones deserve a full accounting of these operations, and justice for the grave harm they have suffered.”
After a two-month pause in the bombings, the administration revived them last week, launching a pair of attacks that killed at least six people, according to social media posts and aerial footage from US Southern Command. The strikes followed SOUTHCOM’s early August announcement of an expanded operation across Latin America called Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere.
As MS NOW noted Wednesday:
In September and October 2025, when the strikes began, US Southern Command, known as SOUTHCOM, linked three of the strikes to the Tren de Aragua and Ejército de Liberación Nacional criminal organizations. Most later strikes were described as targeting “a vessel operated by designated terrorist organizations.”
But the military’s most recent two announcements of strikes simply stated that “confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel’s active involvement in narco-trafficking.”
Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal adviser who now advises the US Program at the International Crisis Group, told the outlet that “they are engaging in conduct that is widely regarded to be flagrantly illegal, criminal even, and have not offered anything approaching plausible legal rationale.”
The OLC memo may be the administration’s “permission slip,” Finucane said, but it hasn’t actually substantiated claims that the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with cartels that traffic drugs.
“This war framing on the part of the administration is really bogus,” he added. “This is a make-believe armed conflict, but these are very real killings.”
Several Democrats in Congress, from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY) to Senate Minority Whip and Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dick Durbin (Ill.), renewed their criticism of the boat bombings on Wednesday.
Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) said that “the most recent strike was four days ago. A year of killing, and this administration has never once come to Congress to justify any of it. This cannot become the way our country goes to war.”
“The American people are already paying for one war they didn’t want in the first place,” he continued, nodding to the illegal six-month assault on Iran. “I fought in Iraq. I know what these wars cost, and I know who pays them. I will use every tool I have as a United States senator to stop this and to defend the Constitution.”
House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-Wash.) noted that “it remains unclear whether these operations have made any real difference in stopping illegal drugs from reaching the United States.”
“This is especially true for fentanyl,” he noted, which Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “have repeatedly claimed is the reason for these extrajudicial killings even though we know that it is cocaine—not fentanyl—that is typically shipped via small boats from South America.”
Smith also called out the Department of Defense for failing “to publicly provide the costs of these operations, both in terms of dollars and readiness,” and declared that “never before in my over 20 years on this committee have I seen such a staggering lack of transparency on behalf of an administration and DOD to meaningfully inform Congress of the use of lethal military force.”
However, with Republicans holding narrow majorities in Congress and mostly still refusing to truly challenge the administration on the boat strikes—and various other violent actions around the world—some campaigners are also stepping up pressure on other governments.
“The Trump administration has had complete impunity for this campaign of unlawful killings for a year, and has stated openly that it has no intention of stopping,” said Sawyer. “Other countries should refrain from any cooperation on these strikes, and Congress should urgently work to rein in the deadly actions of an administration bent on violating international law.”
Jamil Dakwar, director of ACLU’s Human Rights Program, said that “the international community must do everything in its power to hold the Trump administration responsible for these extrajudicial killings that are blatant violations of international law.”
“No other country should provide any assistance that could contribute to these unlawful US government killings,” Dakwar added, calling for an “independent international investigation into this lawless campaign.”
Article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
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