U.S. Counter-Narcotics Operations

Families of Trinidadian fishermen Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo have filed the first U.S. federal wrongful‑death suit (in Massachusetts) — brought by the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights — alleging the Oct. 14 U.S. missile strike off Venezuela that killed six was an unlawful, extrajudicial killing and seeking damages under the Death on the High Seas Act, the Alien Tort Statute and admiralty law while naming President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The filing comes amid a U.S. maritime campaign of roughly three dozen strikes since September 2025 that officials say target “narcoterrorists” (the administration defends the actions), even as Trinidad’s government says it has no information linking the victims to illegal activity; reporting also notes some operations used aircraft painted to resemble civilian planes.

U.S. Southern Command says U.S. forces carried out a lethal kinetic strike Friday against a vessel in the Eastern Pacific that it alleges was operated by a designated terrorist organization and actively engaged in narco‑trafficking, killing two suspected narco‑terrorists. The command says intelligence showed the craft was traveling along known drug‑smuggling routes and describes this as the first such strike since the U.S. raid that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, part of a broader Trump‑era campaign of deadly maritime interdictions that has already raised legal‑oversight concerns. After the attack, SOUTHCOM activated its search‑and‑rescue system to look for a third suspected trafficker believed to have survived, underscoring that these are shoot‑to‑kill operations followed by limited efforts to recover potential survivors rather than arrests and prosecutions. The Pentagon has released strike video but, as in earlier cases, provided no public evidence beyond its own intelligence claims to substantiate the target’s terrorist designation or the identities of those killed—fueling online debate about whether Washington is quietly waging undeclared lethal warfare at sea under a "narco‑terror" label. This developing episode will likely intensify congressional and human‑rights scrutiny of how far the administration is stretching counterterrorism authorities for drug enforcement and what safeguards exist to prevent misidentification or civilian casualties.