The US Navy’s Gerald R Ford Carrier Strike Group operates in the Caribbean Sea in support of the maritime counter-narcotics campaign, November 2025. (US Navy photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Tajh Payne)

The US continues to launch strikes against alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific, carrying out a number of attacks in May and another in June. Human rights organisations say these strikes, which have now killed over 200 people, constitute extrajudicial killing, while legal action is underway in response.

The US government began the strikes in autumn 2025. Through the ‘Operation Southern Spear’ campaign, it has carried out around 60 attacks on small vessels, which the Trump administration says are operated by designated terrorist organisations.

In a statement in November, a group of UN human rights experts warned that ‘these attacks appear to be unlawful killings carried out by order of a Government, without judicial or legal process allowing due process of law.’ The group said that the repeated and systematic lethal attacks by the US military on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific raise ‘grave concerns’ about the commission of potential international crimes. ‘There’s no basis under international law for the boat strikes,’ says Ben Keith, an officer of the IBA Criminal Law Committee.

In June, at a Senate hearing, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked about the criteria used to determine the targeting of boats. ‘Every strike has a legal officer on the deck that has to make a determination about whether the call is legal or not, and this is done by the Department of War, the way it’s been done in other theaters around the world,’ said Rubio in response.

In late June, arguments were heard in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, under the US Freedom of Information Act, seeking a memo from the Department of Justice (DoJ) that provides a legal justification for the strikes. The DoJ claims the memo is classified and that ‘the operations were ordered consistent with the law of armed conflict.’

Very little is known about the victims of the strikes, though the relatives of some of those killed have turned to the law. In December, the family of Alejandro Carranza Medina, a Colombian killed in a boat strike in the Caribbean Sea on 15 September, brought a formal complaint to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. They accuse the US of violating the rights to life, equality before the law, recognition of legal personality, a fair trial and due process. The complaint was first heard in March, with the US Department of State writing on social media that the Commission ‘lacks the competence to review the matters at issue.’

According to President Trump, the 15 September strike was conducted ‘against positively identified, extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels’ who were transporting illegal narcotics to the US via international waters. The family of Alejandro Carranza say he was a fisherman and not involved in drug trafficking.

Meanwhile, the relatives of two Trinidadian men killed in a strike on 14 October, Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, have brought a lawsuit against the US government in Massachusetts. The families are bringing claims under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreign citizens to sue in American federal courts where a violation of well-recognised human rights is alleged, and the Death on the High Seas Act.

President Trump has said that this strike was also against a vessel identified by US intelligence as carrying narcotics and transiting along a known ‘drug-trafficking organisation’ route. Their families say that Joseph and Samaroo were fishermen who weren’t involved in drug trafficking.

‘Under the plain terms of the laws of war, also known as international humanitarian law […] there is no actual armed conflict that could justify the use of lethal military force against the boats, nor was there one on October 14, when Mr Joseph and Mr Samaroo were killed,’ reads the complaint. ‘As a result, the United States’ campaign of killings violates international laws prohibiting extrajudicial killings and federal law prohibiting murder.’

The US government initially filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that the defendants didn’t have sufficient legal standing to bring it and further that the Alien Tort Statute doesn’t permit the US to be sued. The US DoJ and the federal government’s legal representatives in the case didn’t respond to Global Insight’s requests for comment.

The US repeatedly uses the term ‘narcoterrorism’ when discussing the boat strikes. Indeed, ‘narcoterrorism’ conspiracy is one of the charges brought by the US against former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro following his arrest in January. He denies this and other charges. ‘The growing invocation of “narcoterrorism” reflects a troubling trend in which counterterrorism logic migrates into ordinary criminal law,’ says Jonathan Hafetz, an officer of the IBA Human Rights Law Committee. ‘By eroding the boundaries between war and peacetime law enforcement, the label risks normalising extraordinary legal authorities in contexts far removed from the threats those powers were designed to address.’

Hafetz – who’s a professor of law at Seton Hall Law School and part of the legal team representing the family members of Joseph and Samaroo – says this has ‘potentially grave consequences for human rights, including the fundamental right to life.’

‘Narcoterrorism is a pseudo legal definition used by the US in which the use of law is overridden by the use of hard power,’ says Keith, who’s a barrister at 5 St Andrew’s Hill. Speaking on the Maduro case, he adds that the US is using the term ‘to basically say that they can be the world’s police force – to enforce their will on individuals rather than calling it extraterritorial rendition.’