We Still Have No Idea Who the U.S. Military Is Killing in Pacific Ocean Boat Strikes

When it comes to the Trump administration’s justification of continued military boat strike operations, targeting and killing people the government says are “narcoterrorists” in the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans, the unofficial plan of action often seems to be: “Maybe if we just keep doing it and offering zero details, people will eventually get tired of asking.”

To be fair, it’s not an illogical plan of attack for Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense, considering how overwhelming the news cycle has become for those of us attempting to provide some kind of encapsulation of the administration’s daily atrocities. Domestic turmoil has fixed the eye of the public inward in the last few months, much of it stemming from the Department of Homeland Security’s brutal anti-immigrant campaign in cities like Minneapolis, which cost the lives of multiple American citizens. But all the while, the DoD is still up to the same campaign of terror it was employing in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Venezuela, which seems to have now installed a pliant puppet ruler in Delcy Rodriguez. But if we’ve supposedly toppled the Maduro regime, which according to the government was allowing the U.S. to be flooded with illegal drugs, then the obvious question is, who exactly are we currently blowing up on a weekly basis?

I can’t blame the attention of the average U.S. observer for drifting here. It feels like a lifetime ago, but was only in December of 2025 that Hegseth and co. were being grilled over the revelation that the United States Southern Command forces had blown up a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean in September, and then ordered a second strike to kill the survivors who were still clinging to the wreckage, in clear violation of every law of armed conflict. Who could forget Sen. Tom Cotton’s (AR) assertion that killing the survivors as they floated in the ocean was a “righteous strike,” or his claims that the people who just had the boat beneath them explode were “not distressed,” and were thus fair targets? Despite this, however, media focus on the boat strike campaign seemed to die off, even as it merrily continued on through the holidays and into the New Year.

To date in 2026, there have been three recorded strikes, and notably, all three of them have been in what SouthCom dubs the “Eastern Pacific,” without giving any indication whatsoever of where they actually happened. The Pacific Ocean, as you may be aware, is somewhat large. Throughout the campaign since last September, there have been at least 38 separate strikes that have killed at least 130 people, and despite the strongest media focus being on the Caribbean, a greater number of strikes—including the most deadly ones—have actually been in the Pacific. And unlike the Caribbean strikes, where the Trump administration often offered up some kind of thin narrative or rationale claiming where a boat had originated from before we decided to kill everyone on it, the Pacific strikes have been chillingly vague, to the point of mordant comedy. Look at the SouthCom press releases for the last two strikes, on Feb. 5 and Feb. 9, and admire the pristine sentence-to-fatalities ratio. On average, we’re sparing two whole sentences per human being exploded.

The U.S. killed two more civilians in a boat strike today. A survivor will likely die at sea.

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— Nick Turse (@nickturse.bsky.social) Feb 9, 2026 at 8:41 PM

Those strikes were authorized by Southcom’s new commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan, with the Feb. 5 strike (which killed two people) being performed on the very same day that Donovan took charge of SouthCom operations in Latin America and the Caribbean—he was literally sworn in at a ceremony at the Pentagon hours before ordering the strike. Talk about wanting to show your Trump fealty quickly. The previous man in the post, Admiral Alvin Holsey, abruptly resigned in the fall, most likely railroaded into retirement by Hegset’s DoD for the fact that he questioned the legality of the ongoing boat strike campaign.

The extent of detail offered by any given SouthCom press release about the boat strikes essentially boils down to the repetition of a few key phrases: Boats are said to be “transiting along known narco-trafficking routes” or “engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” with zero evidence offered that this is true. The most recent Feb. 9 strike had another, particularly chilling detail: There was one reported survivor of the initial strike. The SouthCom press release said they “immediately notified U.S. Coast Guard to activate the Search and Rescue system for the survivor,” but there’s been no mention whatsoever of this in the two days since. It seems likely that we can assume this man was left to drown in the Pacific Ocean.

Gen. Francis L. Donovan took command of SOUTHCOM yesterday and immediately ordered more extrajudicial killings. Their press release said it was done on *his* orders instead of crediting Hegseth or Trump. Remember that these killings are also about testing for compliance for worse to crimes to come.

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— Sanho Tree (@sanho.bsky.social) Feb 6, 2026 at 4:35 PM

Who was that man? From where did this accused “narcoterrorist” hail, and why does our government have no burden to tell us who he was, or prove that he was doing what they say he was doing? It’s maddening that we’re not expected to have access to any information on the origin of these boats, and are supposed to blindly trust and accept the federal government’s assertion that “these are bad guys and we’re going to kill them.” As I already put it when harping on this very topic in December,

But the nation of Venezuela doesn’t have a Pacific border, so what exactly is the DoD and U.S. Southern Command even claiming was happening here? That tiny Venezuelan ships sailed all the way around Cape Horn with their drug cargo? That they passed through the Panama Canal? That they portaged all the way across Colombia? Or are these boats that were headed eastward, coming in from Oceania or China? Were they Colombian boats? Ecuadorian? Why not tell us these things?

And even if this man and his boat were engaged in criminal activity—which is certainly possible, or even likely—the justification is nonexistent for the United States of America to be able to unilaterally decide to execute that person without proving any of their allegations. The entire campaign to date, in fact, has been based solely on a secret memo from Trump’s Justice Department that the public has never been allowed to see, in which the department’s Office of Legal Counsel signed off on the military campaign, saying that extrajudicial killings of suspected drug smugglers was “lawful as a matter of Mr. Trump’s wartime powers,” the belligerent opponent in this “war” simply being “anyone we accuse of being a drug smuggler, with zero proof offered.”

As Rebecca Ingber, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law and a former State Department expert in the law of war, told NYT at the height of the boat strike “double tap” blowback, to even invoke “war crimes” is itself on some level legitimizing the fallacious idea that the United States is capable of being at “war” with defenseless people on boats in the first place. How can you be engaged in a war with people who first find out about it at the moment that your supersonic missile blows them apart?

“There is a risk that the focus on the second strike and specifically the talk of ‘war crimes’ feeds into the administration’s false wartime framing and veils the fact that the entire boat-strikes campaign is murder, full stop,” Ingber said. “The administration’s evolving justification for the second strike only lays bare the absurdity of their legal claims for the campaign as a whole—that transporting drugs is somehow the equivalent of wartime hostilities.”

Now, a few months later, the administration isn’t even bothering anymore with those “justifications.” They’re just continuing to kill people, and we’re not even allowed to know who it is that we’re killing. Drug smugglers, maybe? Who the hell can say for sure? The Trump administration doesn’t care if we believe that, or they would simply offer proof of what was on those boats; where they came from; where they were going. That’s the scariest thing of all: Our government doesn’t care if we believe their narrative for why they’re killing people. They’re simply telling us they’ll continue to do it, and daring us to object.