Extrajudicial Killings in the Caribbean: What's Happening on the Water

Between September 2025 and the present, 117-126 people have died in approximately 36 "boat strike" incidents. JAG officers who raised concerns were transferred. This article documents what military lawyers warned was happening and what legal mechanisms have enabled lethal operations that look nothing like due process.

Analytical Frame: Law, Coercion, and “Autocratic Legalism”

In backsliding research, one recurring pattern is the use of legal categories to widen executive discretion while narrowing review—what scholars often call “autocratic legalism.” The core move is not necessarily to abolish law, but to reclassify targets (combatants, terrorists, unlawful enemies) so that normal procedures (arrest, trial, judicial oversight) no longer apply.

This interacts directly with Huntington’s civil-military framework: objective civilian control depends on professionalism and legal constraint in the management of violence; subjective control seeks to reduce those constraints so coercive institutions will execute leader priorities with fewer internal veto points. In that sense, the sidelining of military lawyers is not an isolated staffing dispute: it is a mechanism for reducing friction against legally contested operations.

Finally, in O’Donnell’s terms, these episodes illustrate what happens when horizontal accountability fails at multiple points: internal legal review is overruled, oversight bodies are weakened, courts face defiance or noncompliance, and the executive’s interpretation becomes self-justifying.

Operation Southern Spear

Beginning September 2, 2025, the administration launched lethal military strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean. The operation was called "Operation Southern Spear." The targets were boats allegedly carrying members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

As of January 2026, at least 117-126 people have been killed in approximately 36 strikes. Only a handful of survivors have been documented across all incidents.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio articulated the policy plainly: "Interdiction doesn't work. What will stop them is when you blow them up."

This was not a metaphor. It was a literal description of the strategy: find boats suspected of carrying gang members or drug traffickers, and destroy them.

The Legal Framework

The justification offered was unprecedented in peacetime American law.

The administration designated cartels as "foreign terrorist organizations." On October 1, 2025, the president notified Congress that the United States was in a "non-international armed conflict" with "unlawful combatants"—terminology borrowed from the post-9/11 war on terror, now applied to suspected drug traffickers.

This framing mattered enormously for legal purposes. Under the law of armed conflict, "combatants" can be killed without warning, trial, or judicial process. The designation transformed suspected criminals (who would ordinarily be arrested and prosecuted) into military targets (who could be destroyed on sight).

But the law of armed conflict applies to wars. These were not combatants in any recognized conflict. These were people in boats in peacetime waters.

The JAG Warning

Marine Colonel Paul Meagher, serving as the Staff Judge Advocate at U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), warned in August 2025—before the strikes began—that the planned operations "could amount to extrajudicial killings."

Meagher's legal analysis concluded that the strikes would "legally expose service members involved in the operations" to potential prosecution. Under international law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, following illegal orders is not a defense. Personnel who participated in unlawful killings could face individual criminal liability.

His legal opinion was overruled by the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

The strikes began September 2, 2025—weeks after Meagher raised his objections. Multiple Department of Defense lawyers raised similar concerns. All were sidelined or transferred.

This is why the JAG firings documented in earlier articles matter. When military lawyers warn that planned operations are illegal, they create obstacles to those operations. Removing the lawyers removes the obstacles. The warnings still existed in August 2025, but the lawyers who would have continued objecting were gone by February.

The Civilian Deaths

Evidence of civilian deaths mounted rapidly.

An Associated Press investigation in November 2025 identified victims including:

Fishermen
Motorcycle taxi drivers
A former military cadet

None were cartel leaders. Many had no apparent connection to criminal activity.

Trinidad and Tobago stated it had "no information linking" two of its citizens killed in October 2025—Chad Joseph (26) and Rishi Samaroo (41)—"to illegal activities." They were simply on a boat that was destroyed.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro publicly identified fisherman Alejandro Carranza as a victim. Carranza had been fishing. Now he was dead.

The Washington Post reported on November 28, 2025 that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a verbal order to "kill everybody" during the initial September 2 strike.

The Post also reported that survivors clinging to wreckage were killed in a second "double tap" strike. People who survived the initial attack, floating in the water, were deliberately targeted and killed.

The Legal Expert Response

Legal experts were unequivocal in their assessment.

John B. Bellinger III, former senior associate counsel to President George W. Bush and former Legal Adviser to the State Department, stated: "As a matter of international law, the boats are not lawful military targets... The appropriate way to deal with suspected drug traffickers is not to blow them up but rather to arrest and prosecute them."

This was not a liberal critique from an administration critic. Bellinger served under George W. Bush. He knows the law of armed conflict from the perspective of officials who applied it after 9/11.

Michael Becker of Trinity College Dublin School of Law explained: "The fact that U.S. officials describe the individuals killed as narco-terrorists does not transform them into lawful military targets."

Calling someone a "terrorist" or "combatant" does not make them one under international law. The designation has legal requirements—participation in armed conflict against the United States. Suspected drug trafficking does not meet that standard.

The International Response

Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, declared the strikes "unacceptable" and demanded the United States "halt such attacks and take all measures necessary to prevent the extrajudicial killing of people aboard these boats."

This is the United Nations human rights apparatus formally condemning the United States for extrajudicial killings. The phrase "extrajudicial killing" has specific meaning in international law: it refers to deliberate killing by government forces outside any judicial process. It is the legal term for state-sponsored murder.

The Congressional Response

Senator Angus King of Maine called the double-tap killing of survivors "a stone-cold war crime."

The Schiff-Kaine War Powers Resolution, which would have required the administration to halt continued operations without congressional authorization, failed 48-51 in October 2025. Only Senators Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski crossed party lines.

Congress was given the opportunity to stop the killings. It declined. The operations continued.

The Lawsuit

In January 2026, the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights filed the first wrongful death lawsuit over the boat strikes.

The lawsuit described the strikes as "simply murders" that "lack any plausible legal justification."

The legal arguments in the complaint are straightforward: the victims were not combatants in any armed conflict. They were not presented to any court. They were not given any opportunity to surrender or face charges. They were simply killed.

Under both domestic and international law, the government cannot execute people without trial. The strikes executed people without trial. Therefore the strikes were illegal.

What This Means Legally

The administration's legal theory requires accepting several propositions:

The president can unilaterally designate any organization as "terrorist"
This designation transforms members into "combatants" who can be killed without trial
Suspected association with the designated organization is sufficient for targeting
No judicial review is required before or after the killing
Killing survivors in the water is permissible

If this theory is correct, the president has the power to order the extrajudicial killing of anyone, anywhere, at any time—provided the target can be labeled a "terrorist" or "combatant."

There is no limiting principle. If drug cartels can be designated, why not domestic gangs? If Venezuelan nationals can be killed in international waters, why not American citizens on American soil? The legal framework, once accepted, contains no boundaries.

The Precedent from the War on Terror

The Obama administration faced similar questions regarding drone strikes against terrorism suspects abroad. Those strikes were controversial, but they operated under constraints:

Targets were typically senior leaders of organizations actively at war with the United States (Al Qaeda, ISIS)
There was usually some process of review before targeting decisions
Strikes in non-combat zones required high-level approval
The administration acknowledged legal limits and attempted to justify strikes within those limits

The boat strikes abandoned these constraints. The targets were not senior leaders but boat occupants suspected of gang affiliation. There was no meaningful review process—Hegseth's verbal order to "kill everybody" is not a review process. The strikes occurred in peacetime against non-state actors engaged in criminal activity, not armed conflict.

The War on Terror stretched legal categories in ways critics found troubling. The boat strikes shattered them entirely.

Due Process and the Fifth Amendment

The Fifth Amendment provides that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

Due process means, at minimum, some form of legal proceeding before the government takes your life. You get a trial. You get a lawyer. You get to present evidence. A neutral decision-maker determines guilt. These procedural protections exist precisely because governments, left unchecked, will kill people who don't deserve to die.

The boat strike victims received no due process. No hearing. No lawyer. No neutral decision-maker. They were on boats. Now they're dead.

The administration's theory is that due process doesn't apply to "combatants." But that's circular: calling someone a combatant doesn't make them one. The entire question is whether these individuals were actually combatants—and that question was never adjudicated. The administration decided unilaterally that they were, and killed them based on that unilateral decision.

The Banality of Execution

Consider what actually happened, stripped of legal jargon:

People were in boats. American military assets located those boats. Someone determined—through processes unknown and unreviewable—that the boats contained gang members or drug traffickers. The boats were destroyed. Everyone aboard was killed. Survivors in the water were killed.

This happened at least 36 times. Over 117 people died.

Some were gang members. Some were fishermen. Some were taxi drivers. Some were people we'll never know anything about because they're dead and no one investigated before killing them.

The government says they were combatants. The government's lawyers warned that killing them might be murder. The government killed them anyway. The government's lawyers were fired.

The Warning Ignored

Colonel Meagher's warning exists in the historical record. A military lawyer, in writing, told his superiors that planned operations could amount to extrajudicial killings. The operations proceeded. The killings occurred.

This is documentation of the kind that becomes important later—when historians reconstruct how atrocities happened, when prosecutors examine chains of responsibility, when the question arises of who knew what and when.

Someone warned them. They did it anyway.

Living with State Violence

The boat strikes happened far from American soil, in waters most Americans will never see, to people most Americans will never know existed. They received minimal domestic media coverage. Most Americans are unaware they occurred.

But the legal framework that authorized them doesn't stop at international waters. If the president can designate organizations as terrorist and kill their suspected members without trial abroad, the same logic applies domestically. The limiting principles—if any exist—have not been articulated.

The people killed in the Caribbean had families. They had names, even if we don't know most of them. They were human beings whose lives ended because someone in Washington decided they were "combatants" based on intelligence we cannot review, through processes we cannot examine, without any opportunity for the targets to contest the designation.

This is what extrajudicial killing looks like. Not dramatic executions in public squares, but distant deaths that never become news, authorized by legal memos that will be classified for decades, carried out by personnel following orders they were told were lawful.

The lawyers who might have stopped it warned it was illegal. They were overruled, then removed. The operations continued.

This is the fourteenth article in a series examining democratic decline. The next article examines the January 6 pardons—blanket clemency for approximately 1,583 people including those convicted of assaulting police officers—and what it signals about acceptable political violence.