Tracking U.S. Military Killings in Boat Attacks

Note: Images are sourced from social media posts by President Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and U.S. Southern Command. The New York Times

By Lazaro Gamio, Carol Rosenberg and Charlie Savage

The U.S. military has been attacking boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean that the Trump administration says are smuggling drugs, killing dozens of people.

This is a drastic departure from past practice. The Coast Guard, with assistance from the Navy, has typically treated maritime drug smuggling in the Caribbean as a law enforcement problem, interdicting boats and arresting people for prosecution if suspicions of illicit cargo turn out to be correct.

A broad range of legal specialists on the use of lethal force have said that the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

How the boat strike campaign evolved

The New York Times

The White House has said the killings are lawful. In a notice to Congress, the administration said President Trump had “determined” that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and that crews of drug-running boats are “combatants.”

To the extent that it has supplied a legal theory to bridge the conceptual gulf between drug trafficking and an armed attack, it has pointed to the deaths of tens of thousands of American drug users each year from overdoses. But a surge in overdoses over the past decade was mostly caused by fentanyl that comes from labs in Mexico, not cocaine that comes on boats from South America.

The New York Times is tracking the boat strikes as details become available. The strike locations and casualty figures are drawn from postings by Mr. Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, or the U.S. Southern Command, and have not been independently confirmed by The Times.

Known U.S. strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since Sept. 2, 2025

Three people were killed during a strike on a boat that the U.S. Southern Command described as leading a three-boat convoy. The military said eight people were seen jumping off the next two boats before they were each struck. The Coast Guard searched in the Eastern Pacific for an undisclosed number of survivors, and found none. They are presumed dead.