The Trump administration launched another military strike on a purported drug trafficking boat on Tuesday night, and for the first time expanded its campaign of extrajudicial killing to the Pacific Ocean.
In a social media post, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that President Donald Trump had authorized “a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel being operated by a designated terrorist organization and conducting narco-trafficking in the Eastern Pacific.” Hegseth also said that the strike killed two passengers aboard the vessel.
This marks at least the eighth time the US military has attacked a purported drug-trafficking boat, although the previous seven strikes took place in the Caribbean. Collectively, the strikes have killed at least 34 people.
In the wake of the latest boat attack, many Trump critics once again slammed the administration for carrying out what they described as acts of murder.
Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer at The Atlantic, described the attack as “another unlawful extrajudicial killing of a boat our military could have stopped and investigated.”
Friedersdorf also emphasized that these killings would be unlawful even if the people on the boats were involved in narcotics trafficking.
“Even when convicted drug smugglers go to court, they don’t get the death penalty,” he wrote. “This is immoral.”
Kenneth Roth, former executive director for Human Rights Watch, tore apart the administration’s legal argument for treating alleged drug smuggling as an act of war by a hostile foreign power.
“Trump’s rationale for his repeated murders at sea don’t hold water,” he wrote in a post on X. “There is no ‘self-defense’ because no one is attacking the United States. There is no 'armed conflict' because there are no hostilities approaching a war.”
Jill Wine-Banks, former Watergate prosecutor and US general counsel of the Army, warned in a post on Bluesky about the dangers of further widening Trump’s bombing campaign.
“He must be stopped,” she wrote. “This is illegal and endangers America.”
Journalist Mark Jacob said he was highly skeptical that the administration was carrying out these attacks to stop the flow of drugs into the US.
“The Trump regime lies all the time,” he wrote on Bluesky. “A more likely explanation for these attacks is US imperialism: Trump wants to overthrow Maduro in Venezuela (with vast oil reserves) and intimidate Colombia (which criticized previous attacks).”
Colombian President Gustavo Petro this past weekend said that the Trump administration had “committed a murder” after one of its boat attacks killed a Colombian citizen named Alejandro Carranza, who had been out on a fishing trip when the US military attacked his boat.
Trump responded by baselessly calling Petro “an illegal drug leader strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs,” while also levying new tariffs against Colombia.
