Investigation Shows Trump’s Boat Strikes Aren’t Killing ‘Narco-Terrorists’

Legal Issues

from the riding-in-boats-while-brown dept

The Trump administration has been ramping up its rhetoric against Venezuela since Day 1. Efforts to arrest up to 3,000 migrants a day focused on Venezuelans, many of whom had fled to the United States seeking a land with actual freedom.

Those who weren’t simply locked up in ICE’s many forever prisons were sent to places even worse than the autocratic government they had fled. Many Venezuelans were branded Tren de Aragua gang members by faulty databases, fired cops, and a collective of bigots willing to push Trump’s xenophobic agenda.

That meant many alleged gang members were sent off to be tortured by the corrupt El Salvadoran government while imprisoned in the country’s infamous CECOT. The few people who managed to fight back against the Trump regime were soon faced with options even less palatable than an indefinite stay in El Savador’s CECOT hellhole.

The Trump administration simply can’t find enough people to arrest to satisfy ghoulish racist/Trump advisor (but I repeat myself) Stephen Miller’s desire to eject one million brown people from this country by EOB 12/31/2025. Now, it’s decided it can bump those bigoted numbers up by simply murdering people in boats seen heading north from Venezuela.

The Trump administration has constantly engaged in war rhetoric to defend its actions. First, it claimed the mere existence of foreign gangs justified its mass deportation efforts. More recently, it’s claiming the mere existence of an international drug trade is all the justification it needs to engage in extrajudicial killings.

To date, the Trump administration — headed up by hard-drinking, OpSec-ignoring, leader-in-name-only Pete Hegeseth — has murdered the occupants of at least 17 boats in international waters. As has been the case almost always with Trump 2.0, the administration acted first and bodged together legal justifications later.

It’s unlikely these legal justifications will hold up in court — at least any court that isn’t 5/9ths wholly subservient to Donald Trump. But, for now, no court has stopped the administration from doing what it wants, which means it continues to kill people it openly admits it doesn’t have the evidence to bring criminal charges against. Instead, it continues to angrily tap the “King Trump” signs it has placed around the Oval Office, daring anyone in the government to try to rein in the Executive Branch.

The narrative is this: drug trade is roughly equal to terrorist attacks that justify violent military responses. Bringing drugs to purchasers and middle men is nothing more than an act of war. Therefore, killing people just because is nothing more than the US defending itself against an undeclared war perpetrated by… I guess… uncut fentanyl?

Unlike the Trump administration, the US press is actually putting people on the ground and talking to those directly affected by its new War on Boats. Venezuela isn’t a safe place to visit, much less leave. And yet, the Associated Press has managed to talk to people in that country who are now seeing people they know being straight up murdered to satisfy the GOP’s racist blood lust.

In dozens of interviews in villages on Venezuela’s breathtaking northeastern coast, from which some of the boats departed, residents and relatives said the dead men had indeed been running drugs but were not narco-terrorists or leaders of a cartel or gang.

Most of the nine men were crewing such craft for the first or second time, making at least $500 per trip, residents and relatives said. They were laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver. Two were low-level career criminals. One was a well-known local crime boss who contracted out his smuggling services to traffickers.

Now, most Trump fans will immediately point to this as evidence that the administration is right about the people it’s killing in international waters. But even the most charitable readings of administration statements will prove this wrong. Trump and Hegseth have continually portrayed the people they’ve killed as “narco-terrorists” with ties to the upper levels of international drug cartels. The reality — at least for a small portion of the people murdered by our government — is that these are people just trying to make a little bit of money to make their lives back in Venezuela a little less miserable.

The US government has killed at least 66 people this way. And that includes people who just happen to have operable boats at a time when that’s really all that’s needed to put your in the cross hairs of the next military drone strike.

One of the people killed in a boat strike was Robert Sanchez, who was just a fisherman trying to make a living and, hopefully, obtain a better boat to increase his success chances while out in open waters. But because he went fishing off the coat of Venezuela, he was determined eligible for death from above:

Sánchez had just finished offloading a day’s catch last month when he told his mother he would be taking a short trip and would see her in a couple of days. They had no idea where he was going.

After seeing clips on social media that mentioned his death, relatives broke the news to his mother, but not until after ensuring she had taken her blood pressure medication. Sánchez’s youngest son, a third grader, could not accept for days that his father was gone. He kept asking adults if his father could have survived the explosion, noting he might still be at sea.

No, the adults told the boy. His father was gone.

Even if we decide — for the sake of argument — that everyone killed by boat strikes was a person in a boat carrying drugs to another destination, that still doesn’t excuse the administration’s actions. Sure, there’s been a “War on Drugs” ever since Richard Nixon deputized a drug-addled Elvis Presley, but that war has always been carried out using the USA’s accepted rules of engagement. While due process might be a bit of joke — what with the reliance on plea bargains and sting operations that are pretty much just entrapment — it was at least considered something worthy of lip service, if nothing else.

Now, it’s just the US government sinking boats and killing people and pretending this is all OK because… well… the Trump administration says it’s OK. But if you’re OK with this, you’re pretty much going to be OK with any expansion of extrajudicial killings of alleged drug traffickers. If there’s no significant push back, the administration will move these efforts inland, much like it has with its “border security” actions. CBP and Border Patrol officers are now wandering the streets of cities far removed from this nation’s southern border. It’s only a matter of time before this administration decides that the quasi-legal stuff it does in non-US territory is what needs to happen on US city streets.

At that point, your belated objections will mean nothing. The time to protest is now. Waiting until you have to step over the bodies of your fellow US residents to express your displeasure with this administration will be far too little and far too late.

Filed Under: boat strikes, defense department, dhs, doj, extrajudicial killings, ice, mass deportation, murder, pete hegseth, trump administration, venezuela, war on drugs